This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.
Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue, but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would be wrong to expect a general remedy from them alone. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.
Freedom | Language | Means | People | System | Crisis | Learn |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.
Credit | Government | Growth | Opinion | System | Government |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
Community based software development is now a business, one that holds the potential for Microsoft as for every other company.
Better | Capitalism | People | System | World |
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street-corners or the opinions of the newspapers. A nation is led by a man who hears more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice. Such is the man who leads a great, free, democratic nation.
Action | Credit | Destroy | Determination | Future | Growth | Men | Money | Public | Question | Reason | System |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
We’ve been here before. Each century, as we push out the frontiers of human knowledge, work at every level becomes more complex, requiring more pattern recognition and problem solving.
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
The lower classes of people in Europe may at some future period be much better instructed then they are at present; they may be taught to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at the ale-house; they may live under better and more equal laws than they have hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it possible, though not probable, that they may have more leisure; but it is not in the nature of things, that they can be awarded such a quantity of money or substance, as will allow them all to marry early, in the full confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous family.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
Age | Agony | Beauty | Body | Children | Cost | Counsel | Diversity | Energy | Enough | Evil | Genius | Gold | Government | Helpfulness | Individual | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Model | Riches | Strength | Struggle | Sympathy | System | Will | World | Riches | Government | Counsel | Beauty |
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
Energy | Life | Life | Philosophy | Science | Sense | System | Teach |
The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.
Government | Individual | Respect | System | Government | Respect |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
A writer's first obligation is not to the many-bellied beast but to the many-tongued beast, not to Society, but to Language. Everyone has a stake in the husbandry of Society, but Language is the writer's special charge. A grandiose animal it is, too. If it weren't for Language there wouldn't be Society.