This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso NULL
I believe the purpose of life is happiness. In today’s world being happy is inseparable from being responsible. We need to temper the extremes of our personal nature so that we can realize oneness with the universe. We must keep our destructive qualities from outweighing our constructive qualities.
Happy | Life | Life | Nature | Need | Oneness | Purpose | Purpose | Qualities | Temper | Universe | World |
Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness.
Atheism | History | Machines | Man | Men | Need | People | Thinking | Universe | Learn | Think |
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Aggression | Love | Mankind | Method | Need | Oppression | Retaliation | Revenge | Time |
Paul Wilhelm von Keppler, Bishop of the Diocese of Rottenburg
Joy is a constituent of life, a necessity of life; it is an element of life’s value and life’s power. As every man has need of joy, so too, every man has a right to joy… It is a condition of religious living.
Joy | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Need | Power | Right | Value |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
A wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him.
Government | Means | Need | Will | Wise |
If all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.
Government | Men | Need |
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
Whatever news we get about the scans, I’m not going to die when we hear it. I won’t die the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. So today, right now, well this is a wonderful day. And I want you to know how much I am enjoying it… That’s the way the rest of my life would need to be lived.
Proximity to death wakes us up. Death dispels the most potent illusion about life – that it belongs to us, and that we have all the time to we need to arrange it the way we want. But in many ways it is a gift that our life is limited, impermanent. We hold it more dear because this is so.
One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles. The very activity of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing.
Art | Beauty | Invention | Need | Novels | Reading | Television | Art | Beauty | Understand |
Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
We know tradition as a living social process constantly changing, constantly in need of criticism, but constant also as the continuing memory, value system and habit structure of a society.
Criticism | Habit | Memory | Need | Society | System | Tradition | Value |