This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The colored planes, as much by position and dimension as by the greater value given to color, plastically express only relationships and not forms. " - Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
"Neo-Plasticism has its roots in Cubism. It could just as easy be called the Painting of Real Abstraction. Since the abstract can be expressed by a plastic reality.. ..It achieves what all painting has tried to achieve but has been able to express only in a veiled manner. By their position and their dimension as well as by the importance of given to colour, the coloured planes express in a plastic way only relations and not forms. Neo-Plasticism imparts to these relations an aesthetic balance and thereby expresses universal harmony.. ..For the moment what art had discovered must still be limited to art itself. Our environment cannot yet be realized as a creation of pure harmony. Art today is at the very point formerly occupied by religion. In its deepest meaning art was the transposition of the natural (to another plane); in practice it always sought to achieve harmony between man and untransposed nature. Generally speaking, so do Theosophy and Anthroposophy, although these already possessed the original symbol of balance. And this is why they never were able to achieve equivalent relations, that is to say true harmony." - Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
"Think, before envying the position of your fellow man, with what difficulty he has arrived at it." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
"If the scientist turns his attention from the present state of the universe to the future, even the very remote future, he finds himself constrained to recognize, both in the macrocosm and in the microcosm, that the world is growing old. In the course of billions of years, even the apparently inexhaustible quantities of atomic nuclei lost utilizable energy and, so to speak, matter becomes like an extinct and scoriform volcano. And the thought comes spontaneously that if this present cosmos, today so pulsating with rhythm and life is, as we have seen, insufficient to explain itself, with still less reason, will any such explanation be forthcoming from the cosmos over which, in its own way, the shadow of death will have passed. Let us now turn our attention to the past. The farther back we go, the more matter presents itself as always more enriched with free energy, and as a theater of vast cosmic disturbances. Thus everything seems to indicate that the material universe had in finite times a mighty beginning, provided as it was with an indescribably vast abundance of energy reserves, in virtue of which, at first rapidly and then with increasing slowness, it evolved into its present state. This naturally brings to mind two questions: Is science in a position to state when this mighty beginning of the cosmos took place? And, secondly, what was the initial or primitive state of the universe? The most competent experts in atomic physics, in collaboration with astronomers and astrophysicists, have attempted to shed light on these two difficult but extremely interesting problems." - Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL
"There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves. " - Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
"We would very much like to see Iran take a position as a responsible leader that doesn't intimidate or threaten or scare its neighbors and others. But the choice is really up to Iran and we're going to keep working to try to come out with the right decision." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"When I defend my pro-choice position in the debate over abortion in our country, I frequently refer to Romania, where pregnancy could be monitored on behalf of the state, and to China, where it could be forcibly terminated. One reason I continue to oppose efforts to criminalize abortion is that I do not believe any government should have the power to dictate, through law or police action, a woman’s most personal decision. [The Romanian dictatorship in the 1980s] banned birth control and abortion, insisting that women bear children for the sake of the state. Women told me how they had been carted from their workplace once a month to be examined by government doctors whose task was to make sure they weren’t using contraceptives or aborting pregnancies. I could not imagine a more humiliating experience. In Romania and elsewhere, many children were born unwanted or into families that could not afford to care for them. They became wards of the state, warehoused in orphanages." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. " - Albert Einstein
"In essence, the conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to mankind in semi religious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed. Despite this knowledge, statesmen in responsible positions on both sides continue to employ the well-known technique of seeking to intimidate and demoralize the opponent by marshaling superior military strength. They do so even though such a policy entails the risk of war and doom. Not one statesman in a position of responsibility has dared to pursue the only course that holds out any promise of peace, the course of supranational security, since for a statesman to follow such a course would be tantamount to political suicide. Political passions, once they have been fanned into flame, exact their victims… [These were his last words]" - Albert Einstein
"No age or time of life, no position or circumstance, has a monopoly on success. Any age is the right age to start doing!" - Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard
"[It is necessary to assign]... to economic activity itself its proper place as servant, not a master, of society. The burden of our civilisation is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is sill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialised communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired." - R. H. Tawney, fully Richard Henry Tawney
"I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises." - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
"Nothing is so secure in its position as not to be in danger from the attack even of the weak. [Nothing is strong that may not be endangered even by the weak.]" - Quintus Curtius Rufus
"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books . It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranges and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations." - Albert Einstein
"It is clear that this is no longer the transubstantiation deemed by the Council of Trent.... It is obvious that the sense of the Council is not maintained by the introduction of these new notions. The bread and wine have become merely ‘the efficacious symbol of the spiritual presence of Christ.’ That brings us very close to the modernist position that does not affirm the real presence of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist." - Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, fully Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange
"To the degree that we can relinquish personal preference, we free ourselves from win/lose thinking and the fear that feeds on it. It is that freedom which helps a team to go to the Super Bowl. An adversarial position may not be the strongest position in life. Freedom may be a stronger position than control. It is certainly a stronger and far wiser position than fear." - Rachel Naomi Remen
"In their new personal development the girl and the woman will only be for a short time imitations of the good and bad manners of man and reiterations of man's professions. After the uncertainty of this transition it will appear that women have passed through those many, often ridiculous, changes of disguise, only to free themselves from the disturbing influence of the other sex. For women, in whom life tarries and dwells in a more incommunicable, fruitful and confident form, must at bottom have become richer beings, more ideally human beings than fundamentally easy-going man, who is not drawn down beneath the surface of life by the difficulty of bearing bodily fruit, and who arrogantly and hastily undervalues what he means to love. When this humanity of woman, borne to the full in pain and humiliation, has stripped off in the course of the changes of its outward position the old convention of simple feminine weakness, it will come to light, and man, who cannot yet feel it coming, will be surprised and smitten by it. One day" - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"Money enables a man to get food and drink, build a house, worship the Deity, serve devotees and holy men, and helps the poor when he happens to meet them. These are the good uses of money. Money is not meant for luxuries or creature comforts or for buying a position in society." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
"We of the middle classes will be progressively poorer than we should otherwise have been. Our lives will be slowly drained by clumsily levied taxes and the robberies of imperfectly controlled private enterprises. But this will not cause us to revolt. There are not likely to be enough hungry stomachs to make a revolution. The materials seem generally absent from the country, and as long as a government wants to use the war-technique in its realization of great ideas, it can count serenely on the human resources of the country, regardless of popular mandate or understanding... We are learning that war doesn't need enthusiasm, doesn't need conviction, doesn't need hope, to sustain it. Once maneuvered, it takes care of itself, provided only that our industrial rulers see that the end of the war will leave American capital in a strategic position for world-enterprise." - Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
"Never make a decision until you have to. He'd also warn me that even if I was in a position of strength, whether at work or in a relationship, I had to play fair. Just because you're in the driver's seat, doesn't mean you have to run people over." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
"There is no prescription for how to practice random kindness. It comes from the heart. Your gift might be to pick up litter in your neighborhood, make an anonymous contribution to a charity, send some cash in an unmarked envelope to make someone experiencing financial stress breathe a little easier, save an animal by bringing it to an animal rescue agency, or get a volunteer position feeding hungry people at a church or shelter. You may want to do all these things, and more. The point is, giving is fun and it doesn't have to be expensive." - Richard Carlson
"I suspect the reason is that most people... have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things." - Richard Dawkins
"Living organisms are supremely improbable. They look as if they have been designed. They are very, very complicated. They are very good at doing whatever it is they do, whether it's flying or digging or swimming. This is not the kind of thing that matter just spontaneously does. It doesn't fall into position where it's good at doing anything. So the fact that living things are demands an explanation, the fact that it's improbable demands an explanation." - Richard Dawkins
"Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound. And if we postulate him as our cosmic designer we are left in exactly the same position as when we started. Any Designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable - and therefore demanding of explanation..." - Richard Dawkins
"The position I have always adopted is that much of animal nature is indeed altruistic, cooperative and even attended by benevolent subjective emotions, but that this follows from, rather than contradicts, selfishness at the genetic level." - Richard Dawkins
"The sight of her child smiling, or the sound of her kitten purring, is rewarding to a mother, in the same sense as food in the stomach is rewarding to a rat in a maze. But once it becomes true that a sweet smile or a loud purr are rewarding, the child is in a position to use the smile or the purr in order to manipulate the parent, and gain more than its fair share of parental investment." - Richard Dawkins
"Now we are in a position in physics that is different from any other time in history (it's always different!). We have a theory ... so why can't we test the theory right away to see if it's right or wrong? Because what we have to do is calculate the consequences of the theory to test it. This time, the difficulty is this first step." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination." - Richard Hofstadter
"This business of saving souls had no ethics; every human relationship was shamelessly exploited. In essence, the tribe was asking us whether we shared its feelings; if we refused to join the church, it was equivalent to saying no, to placing ourselves in the position of moral monsters." - Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
"My position was a common one; I wanted to do the right thing but could not help regretting the damnable expense." - Robertson Davies
"When the power inherent in a position of authority is used to fortify that position, the institution's purpose is subverted. Behaviors are not aligned with the institution';s professed goals; rather they are skewed to preserve the rank, power, salaries, and security of rank-holders." - Robert W. Fuller, fully Robert Works Fuller
"It is good to preserve the name, wealth, and honors you inherit, but it is better in every way if you yourself create a position and a name. The first requires good sense, but the second demands willpower and great virtue." - Roman Baldorioty de Castro
"This administration is totally colorblind." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Exercising leadership from a position of authority in adaptive situations means going against the grain. Rather than fulfilling the expectation for answers, one provides questions; rather than protecting people from outside threat, one lets people feel the threat in order to stimulate adaptation; instead of orienting people to their current roles, one distorts people so that new role relationships develop; rather than quelling conflict, one generates it; instead of maintaining norms, one challenges them." - Ronald A. Heifetz
"Exercising leadership is an expression of your aliveness... But when you cover yourself up, you risk losing something as well. In the struggle to save yourself, you can give up too many of those qualities that are the essence of being alive, like innocence, curiosity, and compassion." - Ronald A. Heifetz
"When we practice loving kindness and compassion we are the first ones to profit." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it..." - Rupert Sheldrake, fully Alfred Rupert Sheldrake
"Can't take sides? — — —! These were American journalists, and they can't take sides? That attitude illustrates the haughty arrogance of people in the news business." - Rush Limbaugh
"What this country needs is men that will do what we tell them to do. This nation—where the people rule—is governed by the people, for the people, and so long as it is, then the office-holder is but the servant of the people, and the Bible says the servant cannot be greater than the master." - Russell H. Conwell, fully Russell Herman Conwell
"Do not praise your wife before seven years." - Russian Proverbs
"Coming in, I was denounced as a fraud by all the extreme men of the opposing party, and as an ingrate and a traitor by the same class of men in my own party. Going out, I have the good will, blessings, and approval of the best people of all parties and sections." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"If we want to find the manna hidden in our vocation, let us restrict and confine all our desires within it." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"At the outset, I want to say that the organized labor movement of America is not a know-nothing organization. It does not want to erect a wall around the borders of our country and keep everybody else out; it does not declare America for Americans, or for those who are now within American borders. But on the other hand it is equally true that the thinking workingmen of the United States have . . . come to the conclusion that there must be some better regulation and some limitation." - Samuel Gompers
"I do not for a moment entertain the belief that by our simple declaration that we shall make friends of the negro laborers. Their previous condition, their former absolute dependence upon their masters (and now their employers) have deprived them of learning that it is necessary for them to rely upon themselves and upon each other, but I am confident that if organized workingmen will take a more liberal view of the situation, or rather a more practical view, that the negro workman will to a very much greater extent make common cause with us in our struggles. . . [The negro] is a living fact and a factor and regardless of all the prejudices that may be entertained he must be counted with and the way to count with him is the question that must be considered." - Samuel Gompers
"I think the workers understand much better than anyone else the cost of industrial war. They pay the full price.... Labor will cease to engage in contests with employers as soon as labor finds it possible to induce employers to conduct the affairs of industry on a higher plane. Labor is ever eager to substitute negotiation for contest." - Samuel Gompers
"To-day more than ever . . . the capitalist class, or the worst elements in that class, stand as a constant opposition to anything we may demand, and also as a constant force to try and invade the rights we have already secured, and to take away from us the advantages we have achieved." - Samuel Gompers
"When ignorant and reckless plutocratic sheets denounce the sympathetic strike as immoral, un-American, dangerous to social order and stability, and intolerable in a civilized society, the intelligent unionist contemptuously shrugs his shoulders and passes over the rant without a word of comment. You cannot reason with malignant stupidity." - Samuel Gompers
"As one understands the nature and will of God and makes the personal sacrifice required to achieve excellence in spiritual life, one becomes empowered by the Supreme Lord to represent His will, which one has intelligently recognized and accepted." - Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL