This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Crises provide authority figures with more power because people look to them to provide resolution.
The threat of coercion is part of the authorization we give to the traffic police, for example, to prevent accidents at dangerous intersections. Not only do we want that threat to inhibit the impulses of other drivers, we also look to it at times to bridle out own.
Father | Learning | Mother | Psychoanalysis | Relationship |
Some of us may hate or distrust authority, but I doubt that we can do without some form of it.
Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
These things may even lead to an understanding of something that can also be observed externally. In countries where, according to statistics, sugar consumption is low, the inhabitants have a less defined personality than in countries where consumption is high. If you visit countries where the people show more individuality, where each individual is self-contained, and then move on to countries where the inhabitants betray more the typical racial characteristics, show less individuality in their outward appearance, you will find that in the former countries sugar consumption is high, in the latter very low.
Revelation | Sense | World |
Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert... gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture?
Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart
There's a total and complete silence in that beautiful view and the realization, of course, that you're going 25,000 miles an hour.
A hot topic of late, expressed most notably in Bernie Siegel's best-selling books, has emphasized the role of positive attitude in combating such serious diseases as cancer. From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom.
Balance | Evolution | Inheritance | Power |
Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most modern evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of Neo-Darwinism.
Experiment | History | Little | Mind | Philosophy | Style | Thinking |
All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life.
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.
Blame | Enough | Existence | Heaven | Hell | Light | Little | Man | Play | Providence | Sense | Will | World |
Whitney Young, fully Whitney Moore Young, Jr.
You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be strategies, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That's our role.
Dignity |
We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs.
Awareness | Children | Desire | Distress | Energy | Life | Life | Pain | Surplus | Thought | Awareness | Thought |
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
There is a profound difference between information and meaning.
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
Despite three years of falling prices, which have significantly improved the attractiveness of common stocks, we still find very few that even mildly interest us. That dismal fact is testimony to the insanity of valuations reached during The Great Bubble. Unfortunately, the hangover may prove to be proportional to the binge.
No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.
Abstract | Art | Dependence | Earth | Family | Giving | Good | Guilt | Individual | Little | Means | Nature | Need | Present | Thought | Usefulness | Work | Art | Guilty | Thought |
On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy-dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of "agribusiness," which prospers and "feeds the world" (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations.