This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
There are no passengers on Spaceship Planet Earth. Everybody is crew.
That our planet is the one and only planet where life has emerged would be a ridiculous assumption... Even if only one in a hundred of the ten billion suitable planets has actually got life well under way, there would be more than 100 million such planets. No, it is presumptuous to think we are alone.
Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe
A species does not live within its environment; it interacts with it. Over a period of time a species can interact so violently that the changes it catalyzes can cause it to change dramatically--even to die out. Scientists estimate that 90% of the life forms that have inhabited our planet are now extinct. From the earliest single-cell life form to the human animal, all have interacted with the environment. All have created problems for themselves. All have been agents of evolutionary change. All have experienced evolution through cataclysm.
Cause | Change | Evolution | Life | Life | Problems | Time | Wisdom |
A good wife is heaven’s last, best gift to man - his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her arms the pale of his safety, her industry his surest wealth, her economy his safest steward, her lips his faithful counselors, her bosom the softest pillow of his care.
Care | Day | Good | Heaven | Industry | Innocence | Man | Music | Wealth | Wife | Wisdom |
Calvin Trillin, fully Calvin "Bud" Marshall Trillin
There are a lot of ways wars can end - a truce, a surrender, the complete destruction of the planet - but there’s no established way to end a correspondence.
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
Time is never more misspent than while we declaim against the want of it; all our actions are then tinctured with peevishness. The yoke of life is certainly the least oppressive when we carry it with good-humor; and in the shades of rural retirement, when we have once acquired a resolution to pass our hours with economy sorrowful lamentations on the subject of time misspent and business neglected never torture the mind.
Business | Good | Humor | Life | Life | Mind | Resolution | Retirement | Time | Torture | Wisdom | Business |
The opportunity offered by a shrinking economy to experience simple pleasures might be one of God’s better gifts to this generation.
Better | Experience | God | Opportunity |
It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent.
Disciplining one’s appetite may be the biggest spiritual challenge many of us will face this side of dying. In a world where the future of the planet depends on how many of us will agree to say not to excessive lifestyles, fasting can teach us that physical satisfaction is not the purpose of life.
Appetite | Challenge | Future | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Teach | Will | World |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
The principle of nonviolence necessitates complete abstention from exploitation in any form.
Even while we mourn the death of a loved one, there is room in our hearts for thankfulness for that life… Sober reflection can also lead us to a more sympathetic appreciation of the vital role death plays in the economy of life. Life’s significant and zest issue from our awareness of its transiency, its “fragile contingency.” The urge to create, the passion to perfect, the will to heal and cure – all the noblest of human enterprises grow in the soil of human mortality.
Appreciation | Awareness | Death | Life | Life | Mourn | Passion | Reflection | Thankfulness | Will | Appreciation | Awareness |
Anthony F.C. Wallace, fully Anthony Francis Clarke Wallace
It has been estimated that since the dawn of humankind our planet has hosted nearly 100,000 religions.
Dawn |
The machine is one of the most compelling rational of human discoveries. The madness is in those who would use a rational thing to further the irrational ends of exploitation and domination.