This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Despite all the questions raised by our meandering minds, we are in our right place, doing exactly what we need to be doing, at exactly the right time. Because life is a school, we are always I the class that we have chosen to learn the lessons we need to master. Sometimes it is fun, and sometimes we have to work at it a bit, but it is always appropriate.
If appeasing our enemies is not the answer, neither is hating them... Somewhere between the extremes of appeasement and hate there is a place for courage and strength to express themselves in magnanimity and charity, and this is the place we must find.
Charity | Courage | Hate | Magnanimity | Strength |
We believe that the most basic of all changes in human social organization have been the result of three processes. Starting 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, agriculture was invented in the Middle East – probably by a woman. That’s the First Wave. Roughly 250 years ago, the Industrial Revolution triggered a Second Wave of change. Brute-force technologies amplified human and animal muscle power and gave rise to an urban, factory-centered way of life. Sometime after World War II, a gigantic Third Wave began transforming the planet, based on tools that amplify mind rather than muscle. The Third Wave is bigger, deeper and faster than the other two. This is the civilization of the computer, the satellite and Internet.
Change | Civilization | Computer | Force | Internet | Life | Life | Mind | Organization | Power | Revolution | War | Woman | World |
Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It's the sure footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.
Confidence | Discipline | Knowledge | Life | Life | Money | Nothing | Self | Self-knowledge |
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
Crime | Poverty | Revolution | Parent |
Democracies are safer and more permanent than oligarchies, because they have a middle class which is more numerous and has a greater share in the government; for when there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end.
Government | Troubles |
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Inevitable | Revolution | Will |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
The emergence of a superman or a great mystic or a genius or a superior personality inevitably precipitates a social conflict. The conflict will be more or less acute, according to the degree in which the creative individual happens to rise above the average level of his former kin and kind. But some conflict is inevitable, since the social equilibrium which the genius has upset by the mere fact of his personal emergence has eventually to be restored either by his social triumph or by his social defeat.
Defeat | Genius | Individual | Inevitable | Personality | Will |
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Know how to use your enemies. A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Self-love is a principle of action; but among no class of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this principle of life and action as through the whole sensitive family of genius.
Action | Family | Genius | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Self | Self-love |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Never battle with a man who has nothing to lose, for then the conflict is unequal.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought, has been developed, from the first, by the union and conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science... But the greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and mysticism: the attempt to harmonize the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.
Life | Life | Means | Men | Metaphysics | Mysticism | Need | Philosophy | Religion | Science | Thought | Uncertainty | World |
Evil is easily discovered; there is an infinite variety; good is almost unique. But some kinds of evil are almost as difficult to discover as that which we call good; and often particular evil of this class passes for good. It needs even a certain greatness of soul to attain to this, as to that which is good.