This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I believe the single most significant decision I can make on a day-to-day basis is my choice of attitude. Attitude keeps me going or cripples my progress...It alone fuels my fire or assaults my hope. When my attitude is right, there’s no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream too extreme, no challenge too great for me.
Challenge | Choice | Day | Decision | Extreme | Hope | Progress | Right |
Nicholas D. Kristof, fully Nicholas Donabet Kristof
The most important decision we’ll make in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita isn’t whether to rebuild New Orleans. It’s how to tackle global warming.
Your time or my time might be for hire, but time itself is not. Hence time is our most precious asset-and how we decide to use our time is the most important decision we can make.
When I speak to people about creating a life, they often speak of what they want to "do" – as opposed to what they want to "feel." My recommendation to someone facing your decision is to write down a list of feelings that you're trying to create in your life and use that as the measuring stick to determine whether you're achieving your goals. I post my list right above my desk every day.
Day | Decision | Feelings | Goals | Life | Life | People | Right |
Adulthood offered two basic choices: either to help life in its wildness and unfolding, or to resist life by choosing security and routine.
A majority can never replace the individual. Just as a hundred fools do not make a wise man, a heroic decision is not likely to come from a hundred cowards.
Decision | Individual | Majority | Man | Wise |
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Defense | Government | Property | Reality | Security |
We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.