This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.
Choice | Ends | Psychoanalysis | Taste | Value |
Community begins in mystery and ends in administration. Leaders move away from people and into paper.
The search of reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding.
Ends | Experience | Reason | Search | Sense |
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
As free persons, citizens recognize one another as having the moral power to have a conception of the good. This means that they do not view themselves as inevitably tied to the pursuit of the particular conception of the good and its final ends which they espouse at any given time.
Openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that. Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses. These are impossible without an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes. Retention of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut off the mind from new stimuli. Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.
Capacity | Consequences | Consideration | Desire | Efficiency | Ends | Growth | Light | Means | Mind | Reward | Will | Old |
Only those who have experienced ultimate not-knowing, the voicelessness of a soul struck by wonder, total muteness, are able to enter the meaning of God, a meaning greater than the mind. There is a loneliness in us that hears. When the soul parts from the company of the ego and its retinue of petty concepts; when we cease to exploit all things but instead pray the world’s cry, the world’s sigh, our loneliness may hear the living grace beyond all power.
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.
Better |
The essence of conscious living is to act according to aspirations, to strive for ends which we set for ourselves. The human will is blind and can never by its own power envision the ends of our actions. Ideals grasped by the mind in history’s rare hours of spiritual insight are like sparks of orientation, glittering before our will during the long seasons of obscurity.
Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.
25 Lessons: Lead More, Manage Less 1. Lead. 2. Manage less. 3. Articulate your vision. 4. Simplify. 5. Get less formal. 6. Energize others. 7. Face reality. 8. See change as an opportunity. 9. Get good ideas from everywhere. 10. Follow up. Build a Winning Organization. 11. Get rid of bureaucracy. 12. Eliminate boundaries. 13. Put values first. 14. Cultivate leaders. 15. Create learning culture. Harness Your People 16. Involve everyone. 17. Make everybody a team player. 18. Stretch. 19. Instill confidence. 20. Make business fun. Build the Market-Leading Company 21. Be number 1 or number 2 22. Live quality. 23. Constantly focus on innovation. 24. Live speed. 25. Behave like a small company.
Business | Change | Focus | Good | Ideas | Learning | People | Business | Winning |
Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.
I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
Despise | Ends | Government | Work | Government | Think |
Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics, which concern only the interests of eternity; and men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a common-place censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves.
Age | Censure | Contempt | Cruelty | Intolerance | Mankind | Men | Politics | Weapons | World | Zeal | Cruelty |
Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence.
Consciousness | Ends | Knowledge | Life | Life | Philosophy | Reality | Science | Speculation |
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
Man ... differs from all other animals in having a brain which can and largely does bring all the various elements of experience into contact, instead of keeping them in a series of wholly or largely separate compartments or channels. This not only provides the basis for conceptual thought, and so for all man's ideas and philosophic systems, ideals and works of art and creative imagination, but also for his battery of complex sentiments unknown in animals, such as reverence and religious awe, moral feelings (including hate and contempt arising from moral abhorrence), and love in its developed form.
Art | Contempt | Experience | Feelings | Hate | Ideals | Ideas | Love | Reverence | Art |
Jules Feiffer, fully Jules Ralph Feiffer
I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.
Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.
Calamity | Dignity | Ends | Failure | Life | Life | Rights | Security | World | Calamity | Failure |
What business strategy is all about-what distinguishes it from all other kinds of business planning-is, in a word, competitive advantage. Without competitors there would be no need for strategy, for the sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable the company to gain, as efficiently as possible, a sustainable edge over its competitors.
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of willbut he serves as an unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity. An act he has once committed is irrecvocable, and that act of his, coinciding in time with millions of acts of others, has an historical value... 'The hearts of kinds are in the hand of God.' The king is the slave of history... Every action that seems to them an act of their own freewill, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.