This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
Beginning | Bible | Character | Enough | Events | Genius | Happy | Ideas | Inconsistency | Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Need | Reading | Spirit | Style | Thought | Understanding | Will | Woman | Bible | Old | Thought |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Am I capable of deceiving my friend? Julien asked himself peevishly. This being, for whom hypocrisy and an absence of all sympathy were the usual methods of protecting himself, could not bear, this time, the thought of the slightest trickiness in dealing with a man for whom he had friendly feelings.
History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points. And history includes too much contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable antecedent states, rather than immediate determination by timeless laws of nature. Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.
Dawn | Desire | Enough | Events | Justification | Knowledge | Nothing | Order | People | Understanding | Universe |
Traditional explanations for stasis and abrupt appearance had paid an awful price in sacrificing the possibility of empirics for the satisfaction of harmony. Eventually we (primarily Niles) recognized that the standard theory of speciation—Ernst Mayr's allopatric or peripatric scheme—would not, in fact, yield insensibly graded fossil sequences when extrapolated into geological time, but would produce just what we see: geologically unresolvable appearance followed by stasis. For if species almost always arise in small populations isolated at the periphery of parental ranges, and in a period of time slow by the scale of our lives but effectively instantaneous in the geological world of millions, then the workings of speciation should be recorded in the fossil record as stasis and abrupt appearance. The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.
Distinction | Events | History | Order | Principles | Time | Vision | Understand |
The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological—technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.
For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, hermit-like.
Events | Instinct | Memory | Oblivion | Order | Power | Regard |
Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
It was like walking through a field playing a brass tuba the day it rained gold. Everything was sitting around waiting to be reported.
Politics |
Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
The gusto of one, the indignation of the other; the challenge of the one party, the response of the other; the eloquence and the comedy, the passion and the issues were ours-no other country can provide them.
A man must first care for his own household before he can be of use to the state. But no matter how well he cares for his household, he is not a good citizen unless he also takes thought of the state. In the same way, a great nation must think of its own internal affairs; and yet it cannot substantiate its claim to be a great nation unless it also thinks of its position in the world at large.
Desire | Effort | Freedom | Good | Honor | Labor | Leisure | Life | Life | Little | Man | Means | Necessity | Need | Nothing | Peace | Politics | Power | Present | Qualities | Teach | Will | Work | Worth |
Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
I saw Chungking for the first time more than 40 years ago - a city of hills and mists, of grays and lavenders, two rivers shaping it to a point and the cliff rising above me like a challenge.
There might finally emerge a human animal of rare sensitivity whose curiosity could sense the existence of environments no longer physical, where the adaption required of all the species was a subtle change of consciousness.
Adventure | Church | Conquest | Man | Politics | Public | Reality | Search | Will | World | Think |
We in the contemporary west may wake up each morning to cast out our sleep and dream experience like so much rubbish. But that is an almost freakish act of alienation. Only western society - and especially in the modern era - has been quite so prodigal in dealing with what is, even by the fictitious measure of our mechanical clocks, a major portion of our lives.
Folly | Impatience | Love | People | Politics |
Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen
If we can but tear the blindfold of self-deception from our eyes and loosen the gag of self-denial from our voices, we can restore our country to greatness.
Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie.
I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning, which, I think, is hardly necessary in Kansas. When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit. And you men of the Grand Army, you want justice for the brave man who fought, and punishment for the coward who shirked his work. Is that not so?
Assertion | Business | Control | Destroy | Government | People | Politics | Responsibility | Statesmanship | Will | Government | Business |