This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there's any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it's surprise and the unexpected. Truly, we are living in world where the only thing that's constant is change." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"Innovation by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires 'courageous patience'." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"Leadership is the capacity to transform vision into reality." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. Great Groups offer a new model in which the leader is an equal among Titans. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"There is only one principle of war and that's this. Hit the other fellow, as quickly as you can, as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain't lookin'." - William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim
"Human child birth is an act which transforms the woman into an almost lifeless, bloodstained heap of flesh, tortured, tormented and driven frantic by pain." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers (Communist) and the disarming of the bourgeoisie (the middle class)." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"Life’s battles don’t always go to the stronger or faster man. But sooner or later the man who wins, is the man who thinks he can." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"We must become acquainted with our emotional household: we must see our feelings as they actually are, not as we assume they are. This breaks their hypnotic and damaging hold on us." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"One, who is capable of interpreting the meaning of 'secret-speech' becomes the first to come across the 'source of knowledge'." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"My dear fellow citizens: For forty years you have heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many millions of tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you. . . We live in a contaminated moral environment. We have fallen morally ill because we became used to saying one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness have lost their depth and dimensions. . . The previous regime . . . reduced man to a means of production and nature to a tool of production. Thus it attacked both their very essence and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts in some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine." - Václav Havel
"All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses— the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that someday the path may be established more directly?" - Vannevar Bush
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"Through the years of my trance communications and research, two control personalities... have always been identified with my work, and they have never ceased to maintain their independent and separate selves. It is interesting to note that they have always welcomed every form of scientific investigation into the nature of their own being and the mechanisms of my supernormal functioning; but up to the present any efforts to dislodge them or to reduce them to aspects of my own consciousness have led to no change in their attitude, position, or state of being. The control personalities still maintain the roles they have always played in relation to me, since my trance work began. I have reached a point in my development where I can live in harmony with myself and at peace with those personalities, for I am now able to regard them as the finer aspects of my true self. Whatever their origin may be, I do not, at present, have at my command the means of knowing; but for the time being, I am content to accept the controls as aspects of a constructive principle upon which my entire life has been built." - Eileen Garrett
"In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"A kind of racism still exists in the United States, and Islamophobia is a more convenient way to express that sentiment. There has also been an attempt to paint Muslims as enemies of the United States." - Feisal Abdul Rauf
"And still Meriadoc the hobbit stood there blinking through his tears, and no one spoke to him, indeed none seemed to heed him. He brushed away the tears, and stooped to pick up the green shield that Eowyn had given him, and he slung it at his back. Then he looked for his sword that he had let fall; for even as he struck his blow his arm was numbed, and now he could only use his left hand." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien