This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
I think, Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
Distrust | Truth | Understand |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
When the internal crisis of the totalitarian system grows so deep that it becomes clear to everyone, and when more and more people learn to speak their own language and reject the hollow, mendacious language of the powers that be, it means that freedom is remarkably close, if not directly within reach
The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.
Circumstances | Truth | Think |
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.
The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising.
Good | Instinct | Lying | People | Politics | Public | Temptation | Temptation |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Few people have enough character to endure the truth, and to speak it.
Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
If the whole world's our home where we may run, up, friends, forsake those secondary schools which give grains, units, inches for the whole! If facts surpass mere words, melt pride of soul, And pain, and ignorance that hardens fools, here in the fire I've stolen from the Sun!
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
If our friends do us a service, we think they owe it to us by their title of friend. We never think that they do not owe us their friendship.
Children | Dependence | Energy | Glory | Judgment | Love | Memory | Mind | Order | Success | Teach | Truth |
The responsibility for the creation of new scientific knowledge — and for most of its application — rests on that small body of men and women who understand the fundamental laws of nature and are skilled in the techniques of scientific research. We shall have rapid or slow advance on any scientific frontier depending on the number of highly qualified and trained scientists exploring it.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
There does not exist a man sufficiently intelligent never to be tiresome.
Emotion which does not lepd to and flow out in right action is not only useless, but it weakens character, and becomes an excuse for neglect of effort.
Truth | Will | Instruction |
Unbelief, in distinction from disbelief, is a confession of ignorance where honest inquiry might easily find the truth. - "Agnostic" is but the Greek for "ignoramus."
Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.
A large part of the discussions of disputants come from the want of accurate definition. - Let one define his terms and then stick to the definition, and half the differences in philosophy and theology would come to an end, and be seen to have no real foundation.
From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned.