This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
A statesman who cannot shape events will soon be engulfed by them.
The memorable events of history are the visible effects of invisible changes in human thought.
George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair
In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
The public does not in the long run respect leaders who mirror its own insecurities or see only the symptoms of crises rather than the long-term trends. The role of the leader is to assume the burden of acting on the basis of a confidence in his own assessment of the direction of events and how they can be influenced. Failing that, crises will multiply, which is another way of saying that a leader has lost control over events.
Confidence | Control | Events | Public | Respect | Will | Respect | Leader |
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
In retrospect all events seem inevitable.
Events | Inevitable |
The gravest events dawn with no more noise than the morning star makes in rising. All great developments complete themselves in the world, and modestly wait in silence, praising themselves never, and announcing themselves not at all. We must be sensitive, and sensible, if we would see the beginnings and endings of great things.
Like flakes of snow that fall imperceptibly upon the earth, the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. As snowflakes gather, so our habits are formed. No single flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change. No single action creates, however it may exhibit a man's character. But as the tempest hurls the avalanche down the mountain and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so passion, acting on the elements of mischief which pernicious habits have brought together, may overthrow the edifice of truth and virtue.
Action | Change | Character | Earth | Events | Life | Life | Man | Passion | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, n some sort, to be malleable.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
All hormonal function, including that of the immune system and even allergic responses, occur as a sophisticated memory system handled primarily by our emotional brain. Because learning and memory are emotional-cognitive functions, the neural pattern, imprint, or “structure of knowledge” (to use Piaget’s term) of specific learning events includes in its content the memory patterns of those emotional hormones prominent in the body at the time of that learning.
Body | Events | Knowledge | Learning | Memory | System | Time |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
No media project succeeds based on “good news only” because good news does not trigger our alert system. Anything good indicates a safe space, the quiet background against which events can play out. The enculturated mind is cued to respond to the negative as a point of focus, which largely screens out or ignores a quiet stable base, and, because it sharpens and maintains our alert awareness, we actually begin to look for the negative.
Awareness | Events | Focus | Good | Mind | News | Play | Quiet | Safe | Space | System |
We are called upon to love in faith – to nurse our firm belief in the stars of sweet reasonableness that continue to shine behind the darkness of events which seem to us our and grim beyond our understanding.
A person who reads and studies and converses on current events in science, philosophy, political will, in the process, escape from the dull self-centeredness, and his participatory awareness of life in its infinite vitality will tend to produce the excitement which is inherent in happiness. Unfortunately, thinking the interesting thoughts which create happiness is a disciplinary process which too few people employ.
Awareness | Events | Excitement | Life | Life | People | Philosophy | Science | Self | Thinking | Will | Awareness | Happiness |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret. Great passions are for great souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
Enough | Events | Life | Life | Nothing | People | Reason | Self | Sound | Think |
In the breadth and depth of its cosmic stuff, in the bewildering number of the elements and events that make it up, and in the wide sweep, too, of the overall currents that dominate it and carry it along as one single great river, the world, filled by God, appears to our enlightened eyes as simply a setting in which universal communion can be attained and a concrete expression of that communion.
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!
Politics |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
It is perhaps not to be wondered at, since fortune is ever changing her course and time is infinite, that the same incidents should occur many times, spontaneously. For, if the multitude of elements is unlimited, fortune has in the abundance of her material an ample provider of coincidences; and if, on the other hand, there is a limited number of elements from which events are interwoven, the same things must happen many times, being brought to pass by the same agencies.
Pierre Trudeau, aka Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fully Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau
The essential ingredient of politics is timing.
Politics |
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Politics |