This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
If the substance of the spiritual experience is always and everywhere the same, differences in its expression and interpretation are secondary and not a valid cause for conflict and intolerance. The world to which our quantum brain connects us is fundamentally one, whether its oneness is due to an information field within the natural world or the work of a divine transcendent intelligence. To enter into communion with this oneness has been the quest of all the great teachers and spiritual masters. And to understand the nature of this oneness has been, and is, the ultimate quest of all great scientists. Still today, physicists seek the one equation that would anchor their famous "Theory of Everything," the theory that would account for all the laws of nature and explain everything that ever happened in our integrally whole universe. Einstein said that knowing this equation would be reading the mind of God.
Cause | Experience | Famous | Knowing | Mind | Nature | Oneness | Reading | Work | World | Understand |
Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith
As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this.
Church | Famous | Immortality | Nothing | Science |
We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.
Famous |
José Martí, fully José Julián Martí Pérez
Other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.
The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
To illustrate the difference between the innovator and the dull crowd of routinists who cannot even imagine that any improvement is possible, we need only refer to a passage in Engel's most famous book. Here, in 1878, Engels apodictically announced that military weapons are "now so perfected that no further progress of any revolutionizing influence is any longer possible." Henceforth "all further [technological] progress is by and large indifferent for land warfare. The age of evolution is in this regard essentially closed." This complacent conclusion shows in what the achievement of the innovator consists: he accomplishes what other people believe to be unthinkable and unfeasible.
Achievement | Age | Evolution | Famous | Improvement | Influence | Land | Need | People | Progress | Regard | Weapons |
No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
There is all the difference in the world, however, between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: first, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in order to help the bottom 10 percent, and second, 80 percent voting to impose taxes on the top 10 percent to help the bottom 10 percent -- William Graham Sumner's famous example of B and C decided what D shall do for A. The first may be wise or unwise, an effective or ineffective way to help the disadvantaged -- but it is consistent with belief in both equality of opportunity and liberty. The second seeks equality of outcome and is entirely antithetical to liberty.
Belief | Equality | Example | Famous | Government | Opportunity | Order | Wise | Government |
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.
Art | Care | Famous | Mistake | Music | Practice | Study | Art | Think |
Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
Our Master Mozi stated, In antiquity when people first arose, before there were punishments and government, probably the saying was, “People have different moralities (yi).” Thus for one person, there was one morality; for two people, two moralities; for ten people, ten moralities — the more people, the more things they called “moral.” Thus people deemed their own morality right and on that basis deemed others' morality wrong, and so in interaction they deemed each other wrong. Thus, within the family, fathers and sons, elder and younger brothers resented each other and split up, unable to get along harmoniously. The people of the world all injured each other with water, fire, and poison. It reached the point that, having surplus strength, they were unable to work for each other; they would let surplus resources rot rather than share them and conceal good dao (ways) rather than teach them. The disorder (luan) in the world was like that among the birds and beasts.
Antiquity | Good | Morality | People | Right | Surplus | Teach | Work | World |
Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the 'courage' to consider myself an artist, in the great and ancient sense of that word... I am only a public entertainer, who understands his age.
The whole Earth is the Sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on Stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.
They gave her their lives, to her and to all of us, and for their own selves they won praises that never grow old, the most splendid of sepulchers — not the sepulchre in which their bodies are laid, but where their glory remains eternal in men's minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action. For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial: it is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark diem out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people's hearts, their memory abides and grows. It is for you to try to be like them. Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
Earth | Eternal | Famous | Freedom | Glory | Memory | Men | Right | Speech | Happiness |
Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL
Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.
Antiquity | Cause | Dishonor | Famous | Nothing | Posterity |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.
There is one taboo that has withstood all the recent efforts at demystification: the idealization of mother love. The usual run of biographies illustrates this very clearly. In reading the biographies of famous artists, for example, one gains the impression that their lives began at puberty. Before that, we are told, they had a happy, contented, or untroubled childhood, or one that was full of deprivation or very stimulating. But what a particular childhood really was like does not seem to interest these biographers-as if the roots of a whole life were not hidden and entwined in its childhood.
Childhood | Famous | Impression | Life | Life | Mother | Reading |
The lost opportunities of the years since September 11 are the stuff of tragedy. Remember the people rallying in sympathy on the streets of Teheran, the famous headline - 'we are all Americans now.' Five years later much of the world wonders what America is now. As we face this landscape of failure and disorder, nothing is more urgent than for us to begin again to rebuild a bipartisan consensus to ensure our interests, increase our security and advance our values. It could well start with what our founders had in mind when they pledged 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind' in the Declaration of Independence. I think it's fair to say we are now all internationalists and we are all realists. This Administration's choices were false choices. Internationalism versus unilateralism. Realism versus idealism. Is there really any argument that America must remain a preeminent leader for peace and freedom, and yet we must be more willing to work in concert with other nations and international institutions to reach common goals? The American character is both idealistic and realistic: why can't our government reflect both?
Argument | Character | Failure | Famous | Government | Mind | Nations | Nothing | Peace | People | Respect | Security | Sympathy | Work | World | Government | Respect | Failure | Realism | Leader | Think |