This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün, pen name of Zhou Shuren
If we want to work out a policy for the present, we must examine the past and prepare for the future, discard the material and elevate the spirit, rely on the individual and exclude the mass.
Future | Individual | Past | Policy | Present | Spirit | Work |
We don't need a self-help guru to remind us we all have the power to change our lives. Would you like to lose weight or tone your body? Want to be kinder, gentler? How about becoming more intellectual, or more creative? No one can stop us from reaching these goals but ourselves. We set our own limits.
John Carmack, fully John D. Carmack II
Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
Most of us don't get epiphanies. We only get a whisper - a faint urge. That's it. That's the call. It's up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer.
Just as individual ethics can be understood only in relation to the society within which it is practiced, it is also true that individual ethical behavior is far likelier to flourish within a just society. It might be argued that to lead an ethical life one must work to build a just society.
Behavior | Ethics | Individual | Life | Life | Society | Work | Society |
Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.
Accomplishment | Ends | Forethought | Intelligence | Object | Purpose | Purpose | System | Work |
It is one of the goals of religions to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears.
Max Cleland, fully Joseph Maxwell Cleland
We must teach our children to set high goals for their lives, to raise the bar even higher than before. And importantly, we must allow our children to dream.
[Plato's ideal society] guarantees to all people the right to an education that diagnoses and perfects their unique talents, plus a work role that conveys a sense of self-esteem, saving them from the neuroses of megalomania and the lust for power. It forbids privilege and sexism and all other criteria irrelevant to merit. It eliminates conflict of interest from those who hold office and gives the masses a potent checklist they can use to hold their rulers to account. Best of all, it eliminates all traces of "might makes right" and serves as a pattern laid up in heaven to rank actual societies in terms of what corrupts them. Society becomes more corrupt as the struggle for power becomes more brutal.
Education | Esteem | Heaven | Lust | Merit | Office | People | Power | Rank | Right | Self | Self-esteem | Sense | Society | Struggle | Unique | Work | Society | Privilege |
One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.
Important | Knowledge | Life | Life | People | Pleasure | Success | Work | Value |
To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject.
Authority | Confidence | Fear | Force | Self | Self-confidence | Sincerity | Sound | Work |
The real winners in life are the people who look at every situation with an expectation that they can make it work or make it better.
Better | Expectation | Life | Life | People | Work | Expectation |