This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
We can, for instance, predict the probability for finding the electron at a later time at a given point in the cloud chamber. It should be emphasized, however, that the probability function does not in itself represent a course of events in the course of time. It represents a tendency for events and our knowledge of events.
Cause | Character | Experiment | Influence | Law | Need | Observation | Position | System | Universe | World |
It is not beyond actual possibilities that men from outer space have landed (or will in the future land) on earth and have begun to breed here for whatever reason they may have had.
Feelings | Force | Harm | Hope | Indispensable | Life | Life | Man | People | Play | Power | Struggle | Time | Will | Work |
The fact that political ideologies are tangible, active realities does not prove their necessity. The bubonic plague was an extremely potent social reality. But nobody would have argued that, because it existed, it was necessary and nothing should be done about it.
Behavior | Character | Cleanliness | Energy | Enthusiasm | Force | Politics | Will | Work |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
While there is life there is hope, has deeper meaning in reverse. While there is hope there is life. Hope comes first, life follows. Hope gives power to life. Hope rouses life to continue to expand, to grow, to reach out, to go on. Hope sees a light where there isn't any. Hope lights candles in millions of despairing hearts. Where would I be without hope?
Compassion | Freedom | Love | Order | Peace | People | Universe | Happiness |
Rulers and generals muster their troops. Magnates muster the sums of money which give them power. The fascist dictators muster the irrational human reactions which make it possible for them to attain and maintain their power over the masses. The scientists muster knowledge and means of research. But, thus far, no organization fighting for freedom has ever mustered the biological arsenal where the weapons are to be found for the establishment and the maintenance of human freedom. All precision of our social existence notwithstanding, there is as yet no definition of the word freedom which would be in keeping with natural science. No word is more misused and misunderstood. To define freedom is the same as to define sexual health. But nobody will openly admit this. The advocacy of personal and social freedom is connected with anxiety and guilt feelings. As if to be free were a sin or at least not quite as it should be. Sex-economy makes this guilt feeling comprehensible: freedom without sexual self-determination is in itself a contradiction. But to be sexual means — according to the prevailing human structure — to be sinful or guilty. There are very few people who experience sexual love without guilt feeling. "Free love" has acquired a degrading meaning: it lost the meaning given it by the old fighters for freedom. In films and in books, to be genital and to be criminal are presented as the same thing.
Enthusiasm | Force | Politics | Will | Work |
The [genuine] leader will face the painful task of loving people and at the same time of not becoming bound to them the usual way; to know their weaknesses and not to despise them or to fear them. He will, first of all, face loneliness, living in vast spaces alone with only a few friends. And even these friends may turn out to be a bother or nuisance, since all want salvation. Everyone wants something from him, anyhow. He will slowly realize with amazement how infinite are the desires to get things on the part of people. It does not matter what they want. It is the wanting and the getting that matters. And he will be well aware of the price paid to him for the getting: empty admiration.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
And now it [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves, tenderly will I use you curling grass, it may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, it may be if I had known them I would have loved them, it may be you from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, and here you are the mothers' laps.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted, now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
Universe |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
City of the world (for all races are here, all the lands of the earth make contributions here), city of the sea! City of wharves and stores - city of tall facades of marble and iron! Proud and passionate city - mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
Because courage consists in transcending normal fears, the highest kind of courage is cold courage; that is to say, courage in which the danger has been fully realized and there is no emotional excitement to conceal the danger.
History | Human nature | Nature | Universe |
It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives. Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings.
Absolute | Censor | Control | Force | Mind | Right | Sense | Size | Govern |
It is not working too hard that makes us weary. It is rather, I submit, living a life that is against the grain of our true creatureliness, living a ministry that is against the grain of our true vocation, being placed in a false position so that our day-to-day operation requires us to contradict what we know best about ourselves and what we love most about our life as children of God. Exhaustion comes from the demand that we be, in some measure, other than we truly are; such an alienation requires too much energy to navigate.
Force | People | Torah | Circumstance |
Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities.
The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
Democracy | Force | Majority | Rule | Sacred | War | Trouble |