This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Russell W. Davenport, fully Russell Wheeler Davenport
It is not solutions that make ideas attractive. It is unsolved possibilities.
The degradation of our society today stems mainly from the lack of awareness of what is within us. Being ignorant of our true nature, we seek external solutions to the problems rooted within. In our search for security and prosperity we have abandoned ourselves and are constantly drifting away from human values and virtues.
Awareness | Nature | Problems | Prosperity | Search | Security | Society | Society | Awareness |
National Conference of Catholic Bishops NULL
Poverty is not merely the lack of adequate financial resources. It entails a more profound kind of deprivation, a denial of full participation in the economic, social, and political life of society and an inability to influence decisions that affect one’s life. It means being powerless in a way that assaults not only one’s pocketbook but also one’s fundamental human dignity. Therefore, we should seek solutions that enable the poor to help themselves through such means as employment. Paternalistic programs which do too much for and too little with the poor are to be avoided.
Dignity | Influence | Life | Life | Little | Means | Poverty | Society | Society |
One wonders whether a generation that demands satisfaction of all its needs and instant solutions of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive - it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.
Norman Mailer, fully Norman Kingsley Mailer
Money bears the same relation to social solutions that water does to blood.
Money |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
One social structure will be conducive to cooperation and solidarity another social structure to competition, suspiciousness, avarice; another to child-like receptiveness, another to destructive aggressiveness. All empirical forms or human needs and drives have to be understood as results of the social practice (in the last analysis based on the productive forces, class structure, etc., etc.) but they all have to fulfill the functions which are inherent in man’s nature in general, and that is to permit him to relate himself to others and share a common frame of reference, etc. The existential contradiction within man (to which I would now add also the contradiction between limitations which reality imposes on his life, and the virtually limitless imagination which his brain permits him to follow) is what I believe to be one of the motives of psychological and social dynamics. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him. The question then arises whether there is an optimal solution which can be inferred from man’s nature, and which constitutes a potential tendency in man. I believe that such optimal solutions can be inferred from the nature of man, and I have recently found it quite useful to think in terms of what in sociology and economy is now often called »system analysis«. One might start with the idea, in the first place, that human personality — just like society — is a system, that is to say, that each part depends on every other, and no part can be changed unless all or most other parts are also changed. A system is better than chaos. If a society system disintegrates or is destroyed by blows from the outside the society ends in chaos, and a completely new society is built upon its ruins, often using the elements of the destroyed system to build the new. That has happened many times in history. But, what also happens is that the society is not simply destroyed but that the system is changed, and a new system emerges which can be considered to be a transformation of the old one.
Better | Contradiction | Cooperation | Ends | Imagination | Man | Motives | Nature | Personality | Practice | Question | Reality | Society | System | Will | Society | Old | Think |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
In the end, all solutions are temporary.
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Problems |
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.
The solutions lies within the problem. The answer is in every question. Infinite intelligence responds to you as you call upon it with faith and confidence.
Faith | Intelligence |
The best possible solutions come only from a combination of a rational analysis based on the nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using non-linear brain power.
Nature |
Martin Esslin, fully Martin Julius Esslin
The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.
Absurd | Aims | Challenge | Despair | Freedom | Laughter | Man | Mystery | Sense | Tears |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.