This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
Sinéad O’Connor, fully Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor
When you live with the Devil you learn there's a God very quickly.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
Day | Dirty | Hate | Men | Money | People | Reading | Time | Old |
Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL
A spiritual organization with a hierarchical structure can convey only the consciousness of estrangement, regardless of what teachings or deep inspirations are at its root.The structure itself reinforces the idea that some people are inherently more worthy than others.
Poem |
Stanley Kunitz, fully Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow when a new life begins for me, as it does each day, as it does each way.
Writing |
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.
Assertion | Bible | Body | Credit | Custom | Danger | Desire | Dogma | Faith | Giving | Humanity | Impossibility | Innovation | Invention | Life | Life | Lord | Man | Means | Men | Present | Regard | Right | Sin | Teach | Unity | Will | Writing | Danger | Bible | Learn | Old |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
Beginning | Bible | Character | Enough | Events | Genius | Happy | Ideas | Inconsistency | Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Need | Reading | Spirit | Style | Thought | Understanding | Will | Woman | Bible | Old | Thought |
Scientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits… Culture can potentiate as well as constrain—as Darwin's translation of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection. In any case, objective minds do not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable embedding.
Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments. No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined). Local adaptation may as well lead to anatomical simplification as to greater complexity. As an adult, the famous parasite Sacculina, a barnacle by ancestry, looks like a formless bag of reproductive tissue attached to the underbelly of its crab host (with ‘roots’ of equally formless tissue anchored within the body of the crab itself)—a devilish device to be sure (at least by our aesthetic standards), but surely less anatomically complex than a barnacle on the bottom of your boat, waving its legs through the water in search of food.
History | Question | Search | Style | Will | Writing | Victim |
The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier'sancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.
I regard [the many worlds interpretation] as self-evidently correct. [T.F.: Yet some don't find it evident to themselves.] Yeah, well, there are some people who spend an awful lot of time talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. My attitude — I would paraphrase Gœring—is that when I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun.
Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false.
Error | Insight | Literature | Promise | Writing | Loss | Instruction |
Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim
I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.
Writing |
Ecological restoration, allied with the creation of ecosystem-scale wilderness reserves, represents the main hope that the organic quality of wildness may someday be resurrected in human souls and in all life-places on planet Earth.
Poem |
Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim
Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.
Writing |
God doth not govern the world only by his will as an absolute monarch, but by his wisdom and goodness as a tender father. It is not his greatest pleasure to show his sovereign power, or his inconceivable wisdom, but his immense goodness, to which he makes the other attributes subservient.
Awe | Fear | God | Law | Men | Past | Pleasure | Punishment | Reason | Soul | Strength | Writing | God |
Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim
Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.
We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes; and we can trace the products of these genes (enzymes and proteins) as they influence the course of embryology. In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies.