This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby clothes, and after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the poorest home.
Children | Choice | Faith | Good | Important | Man | Need | Patience | Sentiment | Time | Happiness |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
Toyota Prius is a perfect example of a new system replacing an old one and creating a whole new function that is greater than the sum of its parts. The Prius is not a better car. It is a better system. The Prius has brakes. All cars have brakes. The Prius has a battery. All cars have batteries. The Prius has an engine. All cars have engines. What is new about the Prius is that its designers looked at it as a system that could perform more than one function – not just a collection of car parts whose primary function was to turn the wheels. They said to themselves, “Why not use the energy from braking to genreat5e electrons that we could then store in the battery and then use that for driving as many miles as possible, instead of using the gasoline in the gas tank? And when this Prius is going downhill, let’s use that kinetic energy created by the spinning of the wheels and store that in the battery too, to power the car when it wants to go uphill.” By taking a systems approach, in other words, Toyota was able to move from an incremental change in miles per gallon to a quantum leap – a car that could generate some of its own energy.
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Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
What I absolutely don't understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of — I know a lot of these guys — reasonably decent people and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it's over. I don't get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what's the rush? Can we let this play out, please?
We need to become national, not by any conscious effort, such as implies attitudinizing and constraint, but by simply accepting our own life. It is not desirable to go out of one’s way to be original, but it is to be hoped that it may lie in one’s way. Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes. If you want to astonish the whole world, said Rahel, tell the simple truth. It is easier to excuse a thousand defects in the literary man who proceeds on this faith, than to forgive the one great defect of imitation in the purist who seeks only to be English. As Wasson has said, “The Englishman is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present?” We must pardon something to the spirit of liberty. We must run some risks, as all immature creatures do, in the effort to use our own limbs. Professor Edward Channing used to say that it was a bad sing for a college boy to write too well; there should be exuberances and inequalities. A nation which has but just begun to create a literature must sow some wild oats. The most tiresome vaingloriousness may be more hopeful than hypercriticism and spleen. The follies of the absurdest spread-eagle orator may be far more promising, because they smack more of the soil, than the neat Londonism of the city editor who dissects him.
Culture | Faith | Little | Need | People | Pride | Slavery | War | Will |
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
The fruits of holy obedience are many. But two are so closely linked together that they can scarcely be treated separately. They are the passion for personal holiness and the sense of utter humility. God inflames the soul with a craving for absolute purity. But He, in His glorious otherness, empties us of ourselves in order that He may become all. Humility does not rest, in final count, upon bafflement and discouragement and self-disgust at our shabby lives, a brow-beaten, dog-slinking attitude. It rests upon the disclosure of the consummate wonder of God, upon finding that only God counts, that all our own self-originated intentions are works of straw. And so in lowly humility we must stick close to the Root and count our own powers as nothing except as they are enslaved in His power.
Glory | Important | Men | Nature | Need | Poverty | Salvation | Thought | World | Thought |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century—when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all—and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
Heaven | Journey | Life | Life | Love | Need | Wisdom | Wit | Work |
There is, however, no advantage in reflections on the past further than may be of service to the present. For the future we must provide by maintaining what the present gives us and redoubling our efforts; it is hereditary to us to win virtue as the fruit of labour, and you must not change the habit, even though you should have a slight advantage in wealth and resources; for it is not right that what was won in want should be lost in plenty.
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Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes, than the nation's life itself.
Age | Counsel | Day | Feelings | God | Government | Heart | Ideals | Justice | Knowledge | Mercy | Need | Opportunity | Politics | Right | Search | Time | Will | Government | Counsel | God | Understand |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.
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In practice we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good; indeed, it is right to rest our hopes not on a belief in his blunders, but on the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we to believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.
Ability | Action | Argument | Intelligence | Men | Need | Thought | Afraid | Thought |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know - that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.
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We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of the m ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.
The wealth creator has a moral obligation to enrich the lives of others in whatever way they can.
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If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.