This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A successful future for America depends on the meaning we attach to being citizens of the same republic--a meaning shattered every time the left questions the intelligence of their opponents and the right questions the patriotism of those who don’t share their views. That success also will be measured by the depth of our commitment to each other—a commitment that begins in our neighborhoods and PTAs and town councils and swells upward from there. Our success rest on the shape and power of our vision--how can we pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” when the nation is a battleground of uncompromising ideas and ideologies? We need to change what’s in our minds but above all we need to change what’s in our hearts.
Change | Commitment | Future | Ideas | Intelligence | Liberty | Meaning | Need | Patriotism | Power | Rest | Right | Success | Time | Will |
For, as I have suggested, disruption of the unity of the self is not limited to the cases that come to physicians and institutions for treatment. They accompany every disturbance of normal relations of husband and wife, parent and child, group and group, class and class, nation and nation. Emotional responses are so total as compared with the partial nature of intellectual responses, of ideas and abstract conceptions, that their consequences are more pervasive and enduring. I can, accordingly, think of nothing of greater practical importance than the psychic effects of human relationships, normal and abnormal, should be the object of continues study, including among the consequences the indirect somatic effects.
Abstract | Consequences | Husband | Ideas | Nature | Nothing | Object | Self | Unity | Parent | Think |
The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all — except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.
Books | Good | Ideas | Men | Need | Public | Reading | Rights | Security | Wise |
People are an organization's only appreciable asset, but creative people are an organization's most needed asset. Be willing to absorb some risk and failures to allow people freedom to express themselves. Creative leaders inherently know when rules need to be challenged, and they can see when a more flexible approach should be taken. Handle the ideas of your people carefully: If an idea is half-developed but has potential, pass it to the people in your organization who are proven process thinkers and implementers. Sometimes giving your people permission to be creative is not enough; inspire them by modeling creativity. The word 'reactive' and the word 'creative' are made up of exactly the same letters; the only difference between the two is that you 'c' (see) differently.
Freedom | Giving | Ideas | Need | Organization | People | Risk | Thinkers |
Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.
25 Lessons: Lead More, Manage Less 1. Lead. 2. Manage less. 3. Articulate your vision. 4. Simplify. 5. Get less formal. 6. Energize others. 7. Face reality. 8. See change as an opportunity. 9. Get good ideas from everywhere. 10. Follow up. Build a Winning Organization. 11. Get rid of bureaucracy. 12. Eliminate boundaries. 13. Put values first. 14. Cultivate leaders. 15. Create learning culture. Harness Your People 16. Involve everyone. 17. Make everybody a team player. 18. Stretch. 19. Instill confidence. 20. Make business fun. Build the Market-Leading Company 21. Be number 1 or number 2 22. Live quality. 23. Constantly focus on innovation. 24. Live speed. 25. Behave like a small company.
Business | Change | Focus | Good | Ideas | Learning | People | Business | Winning |
Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.
Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.
Involve everyone and welcome great ideas from everywhere. Anyone can be a leader, just so long as they contribute, and the most meaningful way for anyone to contribute is to come up with a good idea. Business is all about getting the best ideas from everyone. New ideas are the lifeblood of the organization, the fuel that makes it run.
I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is ... governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.
Danger | Good | Ideas | Life | Life | Truth | Danger | Think |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
Entertainment | Ideas | Knowledge | Understanding |
John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman
Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.
Ideas | Men | Words | Think | Understand |
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
Difficulty | Ideas | Old |
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
Convention | Ideas | Power |
Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.
Ideas |
The mind of man can never be wholly barren. Through our whole lives we are subject to successive impressions; for, either new ideas are continually flowing in, or traces of the old ones are marked deeper. If, therefore, you be not acquiring good principles be assured that you are acquiring bad ones; if you be not forming virtuous habits you are, how insensibly soever to yourselves, forming vicious ones.
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
A religion is essentially an attitude to the world as a whole. Thus evolution, for example, may prove as powerful a principle to coordinate men’s beliefs and hopes as God was in the past. Such ideas underlie the various forms of Rationalism, the Ethical movement and scientific Humanism.
William O. Douglas, fully Judge William Orville Douglas
Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.
Ideas |
Karl Mannheim, alternatively Mannheim Károly
It has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes. It is a more worthy intellectual task perhaps to learn to think dynamically and relationally rather than statically.