This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Great drama, drama that may reach the alchemical level, must have dimension and its relevance will take care of itself. Writing about AIDS rather than the cocktail set, or possibly the fairy kingdom, will not guarantee importance. . . . The old comment that all periods of time are at an equal distance from eternity says much, and pondering on it will lead to alchemical theatre while relevance becomes old hat.
It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.
Confidence | Means | Writing | Think |
Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
Robert J. Shiller, fully Robert James "Bob" Shiller
It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.
The people whom the sons and daughters find it hard to understand are the fathers and mothers, but young people can get on very well with the grandfathers and grandmothers.
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.
Challenge | Day | Defense | Mankind | Prison | Security | Technology | Weapons |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps.
Having been denied formal authority roles in most societies, some women have learned strategies for leading without authority, and some have learned not to try leading at all. The same can be said of many disempowered groups.
As we shall see, a strategy of leadership to accomplish adaptive work accounts for several conditions and values that are consonant with the demands of a democratic society. In addition to reality testing, these include respecting conflict, negotiation, and a diversity of views within a community; increasing community cohesion; developing norms of responsibility-taking, learning, and innovation; and keeping social distress within a bearable range.
Challenge | Distress | Organization | People | Reality |
As a columnist noted in late 1975, ‘Today it is almost as though the war never happened. Americans have somehow blocked it out of their consciousness. They don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about its consequences.’ Vietnam was barely mentioned in the presidential campaign of 1976. It took us nearly a decade before we even began to face the sacrifices, mistakes, and costs of the Vietnam War, before we began to build monuments, make documentaries and films, embrace the soldiers who fought the war, and capture its lessons.’
The absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision-making.
Challenge | Conversation | Creativity | Ideas | People |
For Gandhi to challenge these ways of life demanded knowing them deeply, by experience, by operating close to the frontline, where the stakeholders of India lived. Gandhi could speak to people, to their hopes, fears, weaknesses, and needs because he spent time knowing them. He could touch and inspire people because they touched and inspired him.
It should be obvious from reflecting on our daily lives that authority relationships are enormously productive. The human capacity for generating complex systems of authority is essential to our extraordinary adaptability and creativity as social creatures.
Challenge | Problems | Will | Leadership | Learn |
The term ‘holding environment’ originated in psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between the therapist and the patient. The therapist ‘holds’ the patient in a process of developmental learning in a way that has some similarities to the way a mother and father hold their newborn and maturing children. For a child, the holding environment serves as a containing vessel for the developmental steps, problems, crises, and stresses of growing up.
Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
You say you are not happy in the Mission. That, in itself, is not a sign that God does not want you there. Perfect contentment is never to be found, in whatever place and condition one may be. This life is full of annoyances and troubles both of mind and of body; it is a state of continual agitation, which snatches peace of mind from those who think they possess it and eludes those who seek it. Did Our Lord lead an easy life?
Books | Custom | Reason | Writing | Understand |
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith.... Afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down.... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
Writing |
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
I haven't seen the book, I have seen the passages that were compared between the two books, I must say I don't accept the idea that this could have been accidentally or innocently done. The passages are too many and the similarities are too extensive.
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
Writing |