This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
What the flattening of the world means is that we are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network.
Government | People | Play | Wants | Government | Understand |
Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
[Autonomy] is freedom to develop one’s self – to increase one’s knowledge, improve one’s skills, and achieve responsibility for one’s conduct. And it is freedom to lead one’s own life, to choose among alternative courses of action so long as no injury to others results.
Insignificance | Wants |
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
The love of independence is a sentiment that surely none would wish to see erased from the breast of man, though the parish law of England, it must be confessed, is a system of all others the most calculated gradually to weaken this sentiment, and in the end may eradicate it completely.
Opportunity | Present | Wants | Think |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
God | Understanding | Wants | God | Happiness |
Life may sometimes feel short at a philosophical level, and there is always the chance we may die young. But for most people in well-off countries today, life is not, as the 17th-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'.
Important | Individual | Insecurity | Wants |
We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this find everything hostile to him.
The highest art is the art of living an ordinary life in an extraordinary manner.
Wants |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
If desire causes suffering, it may because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire.
And in the end, having my freedom, boast of nothing else but that I was a journeyman to grief?
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
Wants |
Of all knowledge the wise and good seek most to know themselves.
When crossing a river in bright moonlight, I love to see the water scatter in showers of crystal under the oxen's feet.
When a son attends to his father, it is a twofold joy for both; when wise things are prescribed to him, the son is [to be] gentle.
Wants |