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
Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extents — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.
Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
Witness |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
I'm actually not against drilling. What I'm against is making that the center of our focus because we are on the eve of a new revolution, the energy technology revolution. It would be, Tom, as if on the eve of the IT revolution, the revolution of PCs and the internet, someone was up there standing and demanding, "IBM Selectric typewriters, IBM Selectric typewriters." That's what "drill, drill, drill" is the equivalent of today.
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
It is a mere futile process to exchange one set of commodities for another, if the parties; after this new distribution of goods has taken place, are not better off than they were before.
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
Humanity can be described as a bad biological experiment on earth.
Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV
What must be the knowledge of Him, from whom all created minds have derived both their power of knowledge, and the innumerable objects of their knowledge! What must be the wisdom of Him, from whom all things derive their wisdom!
Education | Existence | Government | Industry | Learning | Man | Marriage | Refinement | World | Government |
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.
Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?... wearying himself with climbing upon every ascent... bruising himself with continual falls, and at last breaking his neck? And all this, from an imagination that it would be glorious to have the eyes of people looking up at him, and mighty happy to eat, and drink, and sleep, at the top of the highest trees in the kingdom.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
The room was much as he had left it, festeringly untidy, though the effect was muted a little by a thick layer of dust. Half-read books and magazines nestled among piles of half-used towels. Half-pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk cups of coffee. What once had been a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned into something that Arthur didn’t entirely want to know about. Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself, and you’d start the evolution of life off all over again.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There were three of them, three police cars left askew across the road in a way that transcended mere parking. It sent out a massive signal to the world saying that the law was here now taking charge of things, and that anyone who just had normal, good and cheerful business to conduct in Lupton Road could just fuck off.
Avarice often produces opposite effects; there is an infinite number of people who sacrifice all their property to doubtful and distant expectations; others despise great future advantages to obtain present interests of a trifling nature.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
People |