This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
Universe | Understand |
Akon says to Elizabeth: “The cradle of mankind, Venus, remained shrouded and bereft of life after the Pleistocene cycle of solar expansion, her fruitful aeons of fertility at an end, her vast warm seas that nurtured our beginning, dried out and barren. But her glory still remains as a reality in the electric mirage, perfected by her progeny, who were compelled to move from her protective surface, out into the far reaches of space to propagate their species on the surface of an alien planet called Earth, where we adapted to a different time-speed on a younger planet. Laying claim to Earth as a host to life, we continued to perfect our spaceships in rediness for the time when we would have to leave this solar system prior to another wave of mass extinctions from the star of this system.”
Earth | Glory | Life | Life | Reality | Space | System | Time |
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. there must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike.
Civilization | Earth | Humanity | Problems | Right | Sense | Waste | World |
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
Everything we do impinges on all beings. The way you are with your child is a political act, and the products you buy and your efforts to recycle are part of it too. So is meditation–just trying to stay aware is a task of tremendous importance. We are trying to be present to ourselves and each other) in a way that can save our planet. Saving life on this planet includes developing a strong, caring connection with future generations; for, in the Dharma of co-arising, we are here to sustain one another over great distances of space and time.
John Cheever, fully John William Cheever
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.
John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles
There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
Ecology teaches us “that the total economy of the planet cannot be guided by an efficient rationale of exploitation alone,” wrote Burke more than 70 years ago, “but that the exploiting part must eventually suffer if it too greatly disturbs the balance of the whole.
Balance |
As your understanding of life continues to grow, you can walk upon this planet safe and secure, always moving forward toward your greater good.
Life | Life | Safe | Understanding |
The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow.
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off.
Anger | Experience | Force | Guilt | Marriage | Relationship | Unique |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he’s but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves to be the center of things - scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet circling a small star among countless stars in a galaxy lost among countless galaxies. The person with the sacred mentality, on the other hand, does not feel herself to be the center of the universe. She considers the Center to be elsewhere and other. Yet she is unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her relationship, her connection, with that center, that Other.
Existence | Insignificance | Meaning | Sacred | Sense |
Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
Look too on this poor planet of ours, Torn by the storms of mysterious powers, Evil contending with good from its birth, Wrenching in battle the heartstrings of earth,— Ah! what infinities circle us here, Strangeness and wonderment swathing the sphere!
Inexperience is a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only; we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is; we marry without knowing what it is to be married; and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: The old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.
Childhood | Children | Experience | Knowing | Life | Life | Time | World | Youth | Youth | Old |
We have yet to determine how many people the planet can sustain without complete ecological disruption. The data are far from conclusive, but they are surely highly biased — generally along economic, racial, and social lines. Demography is far from a science, out it is a notorious political weapon whose abuse has disastrously claimed the lives of millions over the course of the century.
Perhaps the most obvious of our systemic problems is uncontrollable growth. I use the word “uncontrollable” advisedly, in preference to “uncontrolled.” The growth of which I speak is not humanity’s colonization of the planet over millennia of history. It is rather an inexorable material reality that is unique to our era: namely, that unlimited economic growth is assumed to be evidence of human progress. We have taken this notion so much for granted over the past few generations that it is as immutably fixed in our consciousness as the sanctity of property itself.
Consciousness | Evidence | Growth | Past | Preference | Problems | Property | Reality | Unique |