This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
Ecological footprint analysis has gained considerable momentum around the world as both heuristic device and practical method for assessing sustainability. This success derives in part from methodological strengths of EFA that are both scientifically well founded and reflect thinking people’s intuitive sense of reality. On the technical/scientific side, EFA has several qualities that reinforce its credibility as a sustainability indicator. The method: acknowledges that humans are biophysical entities that make constant metabolic demands on their supportive ecosystems and that all our manufactured capital and related cultural artefacts impose a parallel and much larger industrial metabolism on the ecosphere; recognizes the crucial role of natural capital and natural income (biophysical stocks and flows) in economic development and sustainability; accepts that the economy is a fully contained, growing, dependent, sub-system of the non-growing ecosphere; recognizes the second law of thermodynamics as the ultimate governor of material transformations and economic activity (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1991) and that beyond a certain (optimal) scale, the growth and maintenance human enterprise must necessarily accelerate the entropic disordering and dissipation of the ecosphere; is closely related conceptually to Odum’s the embodied energy (emergy) analyses (see Hall 1995) and the ‘environmental space’ concept of the Sustainable Europe Campaign (Carley and Spapens 1998). accounts for both population size and resource consumption in estimating of appropriated ecosystem area. This aligns EFA closely with Catton’s (1980) concept of human ‘load’ (population times per capita consumption); corresponds closely to and incorporates all the factors in Ehrlich’s and Holdren’s (1971) well-known definition of human impact on the environment: I = PAT, where ‘I’ is impact, ‘P’ is population, ‘A’ is affluence (i.e., level of consumption) and ‘T’ is a technology scalar.
Energy | Growth | Law | Method | Qualities | Sense | Size | Success | Technology | Thinking | World |
Before the advent of the 20th century and its technology, minds bent on destruction could not have come up with the Nazi agenda, even in their wildest dreams. Past administrators simply didn't have the means. They lacked today's communication network, and had no access to automatic weapons or highly toxic poisonous gases. Tomorrow's bureaucrat would not have this problem; he is better equipped than the German Nazis. Killing is no longer as difficult as it once was.
Ralph A. Habas, fully Ralph Alfred Habas
A primary requirement in every enterprise in habit-formation is self-confidence.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
The fact is that consumption is limited by nature's reproductive capacity--over-consumption today means less natural capital and lower natural income tomorrow. This, in turn, may force future generations to accelerate the downward spiral as they erode remaining stocks of natural capital to meet their own consumption needs. In other words, life on Earth (including human life) can be sustained only within the limits of the dividends nature pays on our remaining stocks and future investments in natural capital. ...sustainability requires that the human enterprise remain within global carrying capacity.
Earth | Force | Future | Global | Life | Life | Means | Nature |
Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation. No illusion, sacred or deconsecrated, collective or individual, can hide the poverty of our daily actions any longer. The enrichment of life calls inexorably for the analysis of the new forms taken by poverty, and the perfection of the old weapons of refusal.
Life | Life | Perfection | Poverty | Sacred | Weapons | Old |
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
Abstract | Cause | Government | Question | Stupidity | Will | Government |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
Government enterprise is the most inefficient and costly way of producing jobs.
Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd
The questions continue to grow. The doubts are beginning to drown out the assurances. For every insistence from Washington that the weapons of mass destruction case against Iraq is sound comes a counterpoint from the field -- another dry hole, another dead end.
Roger L. Shinn, fully Roger Lincoln Shinn
Now history under God's providence has reached the era of perpetual emergency, when man's age~old sin combined with his new technology threatens the survival of the human race. Even the most violent of men must recognize that there can be no satisfaction in destroying an enemy by thermonuclear weapons while he is destroying us. But the world is caught in the mood of bitter, tragic necessity. The Sermon on the Mount offers no program to present to Congress or the United Nations. But something of its vision and daring, combined with wise statecraft, offer the only hope for mankind.
Enemy | Era | History | Hope | Men | Present | Providence | Sin | Survival | Technology | Vision | Weapons | Wise | World |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
DUOLOGUE - God: "Daughter of Zion, tried in Sorrow’s furnace, E’en as I swore thy fathers, be at rest. I swore it for My sake, and now thy crying Hath mounted to My habitation blest, And I have heard, for gracious is My breast." Israel: "Obeisance low I made, for I am feeble, Thy kindliness responds to all who yearn. Come back, dear Lord, whose name is linked with pardon, No other saviour Israel can discern, Unto his myriad families return!" God: "Where’er thy origin, whosoe’er thy master, A man shall come—nay, I—thy cause to plead, Whoever holds the bill of thy divorcement. Like wall or tower of fire I guard thy seed, Then wherefore weep or heart affrighted heed?" p. 29 Israel: "Why do I weep? Because Thou keepest silence, Though violence rages and, all uncontrolled, The mob destroys, and we as slaves to strangers, Master and man together, have been sold, And no Redeemer do our eyes behold." God: "Who art thou thus to shrink from man in terror And be dismayed because of mankind’s scorn? My angel I will send, as wrote the prophet, And gather Israel winnowed and new-born: This miracle shall be to-morrow morn." Israel: "To gather me my chieftains Thou didst promise, The day comes not and miracle is none, Nor see I Temple built nor any herald Of Peace arrive to be my Holy One— Ah, wherefore lingers Jesse’s promised son?" God: "Behold, I keep the oath I swore to gather My captives—kings shall bring their gifts to thee; Created for a witness to the nations, My holy ones shall testify to Me— Yea, Jesse’s son Mine eyes already see."
Art | Force | Heart | Hope | Kindness | Mercy | Pain | People | Sorrow | Tears | Vision | Weapons | Art |
Edwin Arnold, fully Sir Edwin Arnold
Almond blossom, sent to teach us That the spring days soon will reach us. Blossom of the almond trees, April’s gift to April’s bees. Early violets blue and white Dying for their love of light. He who died at Azan sends This to comfort all his friends: Faithful friends! It lies I know Pale and white and cold as snow; And ye say, “Abdallah’s dead”! Weeping at the feet and head, I can see your falling tears, I can hear your sighs and prayers; Yet I smile and whisper this: I am not the thing you kiss. Cease your tears and let it lie; It was mine—it is not I. The sunbeams dropped Their gold, and, passing in porch and niche, Softened to shadows, silvery, pale, and dim, As if the very Day paused and grew Eve. Pity and need Make all flesh kin. There is no caste in blood. Who doth right deeds Is twice born, and who doeth ill deeds vile. With a bee in every bell, Almond bloom, we greet thee well. A little rain will fill the lily’s cup, which hardly moists the field. It makes sweet human music,—oh! the spells that haunt the trembling tale a bright-eyed maiden tells! Life, which all creatures love and strive to keep,—wonderful, dear and pleasant unto each, even to the meanest,—yea, a boon to all where pity is; for pity makes the world soft to the weak and noble for the strong. Making all futures fruits of all the past. Oh, the spells that haunt the trembling tale a bright-eyed maiden tells! Pity makes the world soft to the weak, and noble for the strong. The ordered music of the marching orbs. There is no caste in blood. Yet who shall shut out fate?
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 |
Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"
The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands.
People | Plan | Struggle | Understanding | Weapons | Learn |