This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
True conservatism is substantial progress; it holds fast what is true and good in order to advance in both. To cast away the old is not of necessity to attain the new. To reject anything that is valuable, lessens the power of gaining more. That a thing is new does not of course commend; that it is old does not discredit. The test question is, "Is it true or good?"
Conservatism | Good | Necessity | Order | Power | Progress | Question | Wisdom | Old |
What is the sense of our life? What is the sense of the life of any living being at all? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: What is the sense of putting this question at all? I answer: He who feels that his own life or that of his fellow-beings is senseless is not only unhappy, but hardly capable of living.
James Ferrier, fully James Frederick Ferrier
Every question in philosophy is the mask of another question; and all these masking and masked questions require to be removed and laid aside, until the ultimate but truly first question has been reached. Then, but not till them, it is possible to decipher and resolve the outside mask, and all those below it, which come before us in the first instance.
Philosophy | Question | Wisdom |
A. H. R. Fairchild, fully Arthur Henry Rolph Fairchild
The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.
Ability | Calmness | Culture | Day | Flexibility | Judgment | Life | Life | Mind | Openness | Problems | Question | Self | Sympathy | Wisdom | Flexibility |
What causes war is not patriotism, not that human beings are willing to die in defense of their dearest ones. It is the false doctrine, fostered by the few, that war spells gain.
Defense | Doctrine | Patriotism | War | Wisdom |
I don’t see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, I.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in the future.
Confidence | Future | Intuition | Meaning | Perception | Question | Reason | Sense | Theories | Will | Wisdom |
S. G. Goodrich, fully Samuel Griswold Goodrich, pen name Peter Praley
Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue, and renders a man, in the pursuit of defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition, or contempt.
Consciousness | Contempt | Courage | Defense | Fear | Man | Opposition | Right | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
The silence in our lives is under assault on all fronts: roaring jets and blasting Walkmans, numbing elevator music and blaring headline news. It’s hard to genuflect to the beat of MTV. We are wired, plugged in, constantly catered to and cajoled. After a while we become terrified out of the silence, unaware of what it has to offer. We drown out the simple question of God with the simplistic sound-bites of man.
God | Man | Music | News | Question | Silence | Sound | Wisdom | God |
If we care about the land, it will be necessary to redefine whole economies, not just the farm economy. A complex, solid economy could certainly grow around a policy of cooperation with natural environments. Why haven’t we proposed such policies - on a grand a scale as national defense - when our own species is at stake?
Care | Cooperation | Defense | Land | Policy | Will | Wisdom |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
Diplomacy and defense are not substitutes for one another. Either alone would fail.
The great question is: can war be outlawed? If so, it would mark the greatest advance in civilization since the Sermon on the Mount.
Civilization | Question | War | Wisdom |
Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: "What is it good for?' a question which would abolish the rose, and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage.
Common Sense | Good | Poetry | Question | Sense | Understanding | Wisdom |