This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The desperate rush to raise standards in schools was not initiated by educators or for educational reasons. Rather, it was mandated by politicians and corporate executives for political reasons…. The effect is to squeeze the intellectual life out of classrooms. Also, it has a disproportionately destructive effect on poor and minority kids, and it drives out some of our best teachers. Schools begin to look like test preparation factories.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his own vanity. Godlike, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words.
Words |
Some of the virtues are intellectual and others moral, philosophic wisdom and understanding and practical wisdom being intellectual, liberality and temperance moral. For in speaking about a man’s character we do not say that he is wise or has understanding but that he is good-tempered or temperate; yet we praise the wise man also with respect to his state of mind; and of states of mind we call those which merit praise virtues.
Character | Good | Man | Merit | Mind | Praise | Respect | Understanding | Wisdom | Wise | Respect |
Antonio Machado, fully Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz
The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. God-like, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis, completely expressible in words.
Reason cannot make us experience love, but it can give us intellectual assurance that love is good.
Experience | Good | Love | Reason |
Our eyes see only by permission of the mind... Truly our minds can be barriers, not because of the knowledge they acquire, but because of the intellectual habit of interpreting the unknown in terms of the known. The spiritual transcendent and the mind not only suffers defeat in trying to interpret it, but also blocks reception of the formless Real
The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or for intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement without hostility or drama, and therefore all the more deadly.
Great intellectual gifts mean an activity pre-eminently nervous in its character, and consequently a very high degree of susceptibility to pain in every form.
A person who does not know how to use his mind productively will flee from the state of being alone. But when a person has leaned to think, he will greatly appreciate the moments when he is by himself, for then he will be able to utilize those moments for intellectual and spiritual growth. In fact, moments of solitude serve as tests to a person to clarify how thinking-oriented he really is.
You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much. Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature.
Judgment |
The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.
Will |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Lifelong part-time education is the surest way of raising the intellectual and moral level of the masses.
There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.