This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
Weapons are tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is the highest value.
Fear | Man | Necessity | Peace | Restraint | Weapons | Will |
The necessity of establishing some form of government [is] to supply the defect of moral virtue.
Government | Necessity | Virtue | Virtue | Government |
We have not so much the privilege of intelligence, viewed as something above and against nonhuman nature, but the responsibility and necessity to convert our intelligence to the earth. We need to learn how to use intelligence to mend the distortions we have created and how to convert intelligence into an instrument that can cultivate the harmonies and balances of the ecological community and bring these to a refinement.
Earth | Intelligence | Nature | Necessity | Need | Refinement | Responsibility | Learn | Privilege |
Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
As for the necessity of coining new names for God, it is incomprehensible that philosophy and civilization can be enriched by ceasing to think of God as Life, Truth, Beauty, and Love, and beginning to think of Him as a blind and whirling space-time configuration dancing dizzily in an Einstein universe, plunging forward along a path of which He is ignorant, toward a goal of which He knows nothing whatever.
Beauty | Beginning | Civilization | God | Life | Life | Love | Necessity | Nothing | Philosophy | Space | Time | Truth | Universe | God | Think |
Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure. I believe that restlessness is discontent, and discontent is merely the first necessity of progress.
Discontent | Failure | Man | Necessity | Progress | Restlessness | Will |
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
John D. Rockefeller, fully John Davidson Rockefeller I
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
Dignity | Labor | Man | Opportunity | World |
Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity of wandering.
All religions promise a reward… for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.
Heart | Promise | Reward | Understanding | Will |
The most potent force in the world is an idea which, when organized into a body of concepts, becomes a culture and way of life. Concepts are psychological lenses focusing our experiences. Our physical eyes bring their reports but our conceptual lenses interpret them. If we would “know ourselves” it is a paramount necessity that we should examine critically and impartially our conceptual heritage and endeavor to discover why we accept or reject it.
Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people.
Discernment | People | Teacher | Think |
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Heart | Punishment | World |