This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
Sterling M. McMurrin, fully Sterling Moss McMurrin
An educated man is one who loves knowledge and will accept no substitutes and whose life is made meaningful through the never-ending process of the cultivation of his total intellectual resources.
Cultivation | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Will | Wisdom |
As ages roll on there is doubtless a progression in human nature. The intellectual comes to rule the physical, and the moral claims to subordinate both. It is no longer strength of body that prevails, but strength of mind; while the law of God proclaims itself superior to both.
Body | God | Human nature | Law | Mind | Nature | Rule | Strength | Wisdom | God |
Robert C. Pooley, fully Robert Cecil Pooley
Our responsibility as educators is to teach youth to have respect for those who differ from the customary ways as well as for those who conform. In simpler words, we have a profound obligation both to education and to society itself to support and strengthen the right to be different, and to create a sound respect for intellectual superiority.
Education | Obligation | Respect | Responsibility | Right | Society | Sound | Superiority | Teach | Wisdom | Words | Youth | Society | Respect | Youth |
Max Nordau, fully Max Simon Nordau, born Simon Maximilian Südfeld
Whoever preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress.
Absence | Discipline | Enemy | Progress | Wisdom |
No one should make a statement like "youth is the happiest time of life" without being prepared to accept its intellectual consequences.
The function of art is no longer to satisfy wants, including intellectual wants, but to serve as a stimulus to further creation. The Sistine Chapel is valuable not for the feelings it aroused in the past but for the creative acts it will instigate in the future. Art comes into being through a chain of inspiration.
Art | Feelings | Future | Inspiration | Past | Wants | Will | Wisdom | Art |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
In the end we shall have to say that there is no solution of an intellectual kind and that it is part of the general mystical paradox that the mystical revelation transcends the intellect.
Mystical | Paradox | Revelation | Wisdom |
Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler
Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.
It is not the eye, that sees the beauty of the heaven, nor the ear, that hears the sweetness of music or the glad tidings of a prosperous accident, but the soul, that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections; and the more noble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savory are its perceptions.
Accident | Beauty | Heaven | Music | Soul | Wisdom | Beauty |