This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Angela Merkel, fully Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner
Today's vote underlined that as the strongest bloc in parliament, it is up to us to build a government. We are faced with a challenge that is difficult, but solvable.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
It would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of Communism. In a certain sense Communism as a system fell by itself. It fell as a consequence of its own mistakes and abuses. It proved to be a medicine more dangerous than the disease itself. It did not bring about true social reform, yet it did become a powerful threat and challenge to the entire world. But it fell by itself, because of its own inherent weakness.
Challenge | Disease | Providence | Sense | System |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job.
Body | Challenge | Individual | Labor | Light | Opinion | Sense | Will | Work | World |
Today's electronic village has certainly complicated the challenge of parenting. When It Takes a Village was published, the Internet was largely the province of scientists; no one owned an iPod; and cell phones weighed as much as bricks. Innovations are now coming at an exponentially faster pace, and media saturates our kids' lives as never before. Many of these changes are for the good: when I was in college, a phone call home was rare and a flight home, a once-a-year luxury. Now I know parents who see and speak to their kids every day by computer and video hookups, and I think how much Bill would have loved that when he was campaigning. But knowing that one third of kids under six have TVs in their rooms, that the fashion industry is marketing its latest styles to preteen girls, and that predators stalk our children through the World Wide Web makes me thankful to have raised Chelsea in a less media-saturated time.
Challenge | Children | Computer | Day | Industry | Internet | Knowing | Parents | World | Think |
Often times when you face such an overwhelming challenge as global climate change, it can be somewhat daunting - it's kind of like trying to lose weight, which I know something about.
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea at first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.
Writing |
Here we are, with tremendous opportunity before us. I challenge you to get to work to bring us up to a higher level of service. Let us share with others the benefits we have gained for ourselves.
Challenge | Opportunity | Work |
Raymond Aron, fully Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron
The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the skeptics.
Abstract | Absurd | Challenge | Doubt | Individual | Man | Plan | Redemption | Revolution | Soul | Surrender | Teach |
One of the justifications for this campaign is to preserve and expand the right of third parties and independent candidates to challenge the two-party duopoly system... I see it as a civil liberties issue of free speech.
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
[Washington is] corporate-occupied territory... We need more political and civic energies inside the campaign to challenge this two-party duopoly that's trending toward one-party districts all over the country.
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
Never give up: There are certain times that you think, OK, you have beaten me down to my knees. And now the challenge is, I am on my knees and you keep on beating me down. And the question is, are you going to keep beating me all the way to the ground or will I find a way to struggle my way back on to my feet.
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
I have never thought of writing as hard work, but I have worked hard to find a voice.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
My stories run up and bite me in the leg -- I respond by writing them down - everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
Writing |
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.
Better | Children | Cult | Good | Little | Mystery | Need | Past | Peace | Story | War | Will | Writing |