This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Max DePree, alternatively De Pree or Depree
Leaders are walking and talking manuals of behavior. As we listen to them, we silently ask ourselves what they did last Friday morning when there was a problem. And we watch. And just as surely as financial people measure return on assets, we all measure the behavior of our leaders. We measure it against our ideals and our realities.
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."... Neither half of that statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. "What your country can do for you" implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward. "What you can do for your country" assumes that the government is the master, the citizen the servant.
Government | Ideals | Men | Government |
With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.
Children | Hope | Ideals | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Teach | Time | Will |
We want our children to become warm, decent human beings who reach out generously to those in need. We hope they find values and ideals to give their lives purpose so they contribute to the world and make it a better place because they have lived in it. Intelligence, success, and high achievement are worthy goals, but they mean nothing if our children are not basically kind and loving people.
Achievement | Better | Children | Hope | Ideals | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | World |
I have observed in the House of Morgan a largeness, nobility and firmness of character the like of which is very scarce indeed. I can only smile when I read the attempts to find something discreditable in the transactions of J.P. Morgan & Co. Not a hundred of such investigations will ever uncover anything which an unprejudiced judge would not consider honorable, fair, decent and in every way conforming to the high ideals and ethical standards of business. I would be willing to stake my life on it.
Character | Firmness | Ideals | Life | Life | Nobility | Smile | Will |
While I have not lost faith in its potentialities, my views have changed since. War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only though annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong.
Barbarism | Better | Cause | Devotion | Earth | Energy | Faith | Ideals | Mercy | Understanding | War | Will | World |
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
When we start out on a spiritual path we often have ideals we think we're supposed to live up to. We feel we're supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then ironically, taking in pain - breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are - heightens your awareness of exactly where you're stuck.
Awareness | Better | Ideals | Pain | Practice | Awareness | Think |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.
Above all is every thought and feeling in these poems touched by the light of the great revolutionary truth that man, unfolded through vast stretches of time out of lowly antecedents, is a rising, not a fallen creature; emerging slowly from purely animal life; as slowly as the strata are piled and the ocean beds hollowed; whole races still barely emerged, countless individuals in the foremost races barely emerged: "the wolf, the snake, the hog" yet lingering in the best; but new ideals achieved, and others come in sight, so that what once seemed fit is fit no longer, is adhered to uneasily and with shame; the conflicts and antagonisms between what we call good and evil, at once the sign and the means of emergence, and needing to account for them no supposed primeval disaster, no outside power thwarting and marring the Divine handiwork, the perfect fitness to its time and place of all that has proceeded from the Great Source. In a word that Evil is relative; is that which the slowly developing reason and conscience bid us leave behind. The prowess of the lion, the subtlety of the fox, are cruelty and duplicity in man.
Cruelty | Evil | Good | Ideals | Light | Means | Prowess | Reason | Thought | Time | Truth | Cruelty | Thought |
I would therefore like to call upon those who have an interest in expanding their capacity for promoting intellectual freedom and humanitarian ideals to take a principled stand against companies that are doing business with the Burmese military regime. Please use your liberty to promote ours.
Business | Capacity | Freedom | Ideals | Liberty | Business |
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.
Art | Courage | Ends | Ideals | Life | Life | Luxury | Men | Occupation | Sense | Time | Art | Happiness |
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.
Once you don't vote your ideals ... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.
Ideals |
Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The value and dignity of the individual is threatened whenever it is assumed that individual desires, hopes and ideals can be fitted with friction harmony into the collective purposes of man. The individual is not discrete. He cannot find his fulfillment outside of the community; but he also cannot find fulfillment completely within society. In so far as he finds fulfillment within society he must abate his individual ambitions. He must 'die to self' if he would truly live. In so far as he finds fulfillment beyond every historical community he lives his life in painful tension with even the best community, sometimes achieving standards of conduct which defy the standards of the community with a resolute we must obey God rather than man.
Conduct | Dignity | Fulfillment | God | Harmony | Ideals | Individual | Life | Life | Society | Society | God | Value |
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself, it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the native ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naive ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.
Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd
Our ideals of freedom, set forth and realized in our Constitution, are our greatest export to the world.
Ideals |