This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Think |
Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false.
Error | Insight | Literature | Promise | Writing | Loss | Instruction |
When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius, in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that brevity is the soul of wit (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet's Madness.)
Example | Insight | Need | Philosophy | Sense |
Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you're free - however free one can be on this planet.
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
The public, which has been wrong before and is wrong now, can accept only demons and angels on the stage
Age | Appearance | Famous | Guests | Mind |
The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were (the good) deprived of the use of them ... the weak will become a prey to the strong.
The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.
Story |
Wes Nisker, fully Wes "Scoop" Nisker
"Self-liberation" is what the Buddhist path is about; it's seeing through the illusion of a separate self and that, I think, attracted us a lot because we were burdened with too much self-the land of individual license plates and special little monads of selfhood buzzing around.
Art | Enough | Good | Learning | Life | Life | Meditation | Philosophy | Reading | Understanding | Art |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn't exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you!--you have married a monster.
As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.
Intelligence | Land | Story | Time | Tradition |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
I just make what I like - warm and human stories, ones about historic characters and events, and about animals. If there is a secret, I guess it's that I never make the pictures too childish, but always try to get in a little satire of adult foibles.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public.
Contentment | Good | Happy | Public | Worry | Happiness | Think |
Walt Kelley, fully Walter Crawford "Walt" Kelly, Jr.
[After Pogo says, Eventual Porky, I figger ev'ry critter's heart's in the right place., Porky responds:] If you gotta be wrong 'bout somthin', that's 'bout the best thing they is to be wrong 'bout.
All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that delays are dangerous, and that the sluggish man — the man who roasteth not that which he took in hunting — will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.