This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We Greeks are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.
Discussion | Justice | Necessity | Question |
Hatred also is short lived; but that which makes the splendor of the present and the glory of the future remains forever unforgotten
Discussion | Justice | Necessity | Question |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.
Question |
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
The hunger strike at UCLA led to hundreds of students actually studying the farm worker experience and Chicanos in the context of Latin America, whereas they would have been on the outside raising fists and banners. So I count that as activism inside the classroom.
Government | Question | Government |
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. The old distinction between artists and scientists must vanish. Every time we teach a child correct usage of an external symbol, we must spend as much time teaching him how to fission and reassemble external grammar to communicate the internal. The training of artists and creative performers can be a straightforward, almost mechanical process. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
All animals copulate but only humans osculate. Parakeets rub beaks? Sure they do, but only little old ladies who murder schoolchildren with knitting needles to steal their lunch money so that they can buy fresh kidneys to feed overweight kitty cats would place bird billing in the realm of the true kiss.
Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine: thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine, whose weakness married to thy stronger state makes with me thy strength to communicate. If aught possess thee from me, it is dross, usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss; who all for want of pruning, with intrusion infect thy sap and live on thy confusion. Comedy of Errors, Act ii, Scene 2
Muslim women do not regard Islam as an obstacle to their progress; indeed, many may see it as a crucial component of that progress.
Appreciation | Cause | Diversity | Justice | Law | Question | Tradition | Understanding | Appreciation |
Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off . . . .
Absolute | Day | Human nature | Nature | Present | Question | War |
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.
Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
Authority | Civilization | Cruelty | Discipline | Doubt | Duty | Force | Little | Manliness | Men | Opinion | Public | Question | War | Work | Cruelty | Afraid |
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.
Absolute | Ambition | Blush | Education | Feelings | Honor | Individual | Men | Pride | Question | Race | Reason | Right | Shame | System | Time | Worth | Ambition | Old |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way's life ... The weather forecast hadn't mentioned that, of course, that wasn't the job of the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.