This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people. Nixon: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry? Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much. Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?...I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.
Think |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
I'd rather use the nuclear bomb...Does that bother you I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sake. [to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on escalating the Vietnam War ]
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.
Challenge | Day | Defense | Mankind | Prison | Security | Technology | Weapons |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
The distance between the present system and our proposal is like comparing the distance between a Model T and the space shuttle. And I should know I've seen both.
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
So the ... the helm is right here. And that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.
Evil | Good | History | Pride | Race | Right | Struggle | Temptation | Temptation |
In the midst of crisis, the first priority is to evaluate the level of social distress, and, if it is too high, take action to bring it into a productive range.
Capacity | Distinguish | Self | War | World |
Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining example of the modern conscience.
Age |
Bacteria represent the world's greatest success story. They are today and have always been the modal organisms on earth; they cannot be nuked to oblivion and will outlive us all. This time is their time, not the age of mammals as our textbooks chauvinistically proclaim. But their price for such success is permanent relegation to a microworld, and they cannot know the joy and pain of consciousness. We live in a universe of trade-offs; complexity and persistence do not work well as partners.
The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries have various fates: Most burn or unravel in the footsteps of time and the fires of later discovery. But their glory lies in their integrity as unified structures of great complexity and broad implication.
As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth. As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change... There’s a realization that we are changing our climate for the worse. That would have catastrophic effects. Although the threat is not as dire as that of nuclear weapons right now, in the long term we are looking at a serious threat.
Beginning | Better | Confidence | Discovery | Optimism | Search | Thought | Uncertainty | Will | Theoretical | Discovery | Govern | Thought |
As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable.
Action | Change | Duty | Learning | Life | Life | Public | Right | Weapons | Understand |
I hope they can bring more awareness. I think there's probably a lot more people out there who have it and don't know it.
Safe |
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.
Though there is no use in placing our hopes on a totally utopian new world in which everyone is sublimely merciful, we are obliged to seek some way of giving the mercy and compassion a social, even a political, dimension. The eschatological function of mercy, we repeat, is to prepare the transformation of the world, and to usher in the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is manifestly “not of this world”, but it demands to be typified and prepared by such forms of heroic social witness that makes mercy plain and evident in the world… mercy must discover, in faith, in the Spirit, a power strong enough to initiate the transformation of the world into a realm of understanding, unity and relative peace, where mankind, nations and societies are willing to make the enormous sacrifices required if they are to communicate intelligibly with one another, understand one another, cooperate with one another in feeding the hungry millions and in building a world of peace.