This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The final test of religious faith... is whether it will enable men to endure insecurity without complacency or despair, whether it can so interpret the ancient verities that they will not become mere escape hatches from responsibilities but instruments of insights into what civilization means.
Civilization | Complacency | Despair | Faith | Insecurity | Means | Men | Will |
A just war is in the long run far better for a nation’s soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence toward wrong or injustice. Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war is far better than never to have fought at all.
Better | Consequences | Injustice | Injustice | Peace | Soul | War | Wrong |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, and the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone... the final desolation of solitude in the phantasmal world of imagination, shuffling memories, and desires.
Desolation | Hell | Imagination | Nothing | Solitude | World |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Emotions | Means | Personality | Poetry |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
What is hell? Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all to squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of subhuman emotionalism and panic animality.
Darkness | Ego | Experience | Little | Panic | Personality | Self |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great works springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.
Aspiration | Life | Life | Men | Nature | Reason | Thought | World | Aspiration | Thought |
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor, and limited, that the urge to escape and the longing to transcend themselves, if only for a few moments, is and always has been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Religion in American takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions... How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?
Government | People | Religion | Society | Society | Government |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Means | Personality |
Akon says to Elizabeth: “We found the pyramidal type of construction most suitable for Earth and Mars where many earthquakes plagued us and radiations remained a hazard. The pyramids were constructed by us and used by later civilizations for places of worship and for burial. They are cosmic libraries, and in time, will point the way to the stars. The human race of Earth will find an escape route to the stars and away from the violence within the Sun’s system created by its variable nature.”
I strongly believe that education is the best means for people to progress in life. It gives people many, many choices for the kind of life they want to live, and the kind of lifestyle they want to have. But more importantly I think – and it’s a cliché, but it’s true – a well-educated society maintains a rich democracy. When our society is not well educated, democracy suffers. The other reason that I strongly support public education is that it is the best means for people who come from poor economic background to escape poverty. The obstacles are greater, but at least the opportunities are there. Education helps to level the playing field.
Democracy | Education | Life | Life | Means | People | Progress | Public | Reason | Society | Society | Think |
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation. "Let us eat, drink and be merry," says the pessimist, "for to-morrow we die." If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.
Day | Duty | Fear | Forgetfulness | Individual | Life | Life | Light | Music | Pessimism |
Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn
I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.
So, life has problems and conflicts and miseries only when you use relationship as a means of becoming, that is, when you gratify yourself through relationship. When I use another, or when I use property or an idea as a means of self-expansion, which is the perpetuation of gratification, then life becomes a series of ceaseless conflicts and miseries. It is only when I understand relationship - which is the beginning of self-knowledge - that self-knowledge brings about right thinking with regard to what is; and it is right thinking that dissolves our problems - not the gurus, not the heroes, not the mahatmas, not the literature, but the capacity to see what is and not escape from what is.
Beginning | Capacity | Life | Life | Means | Problems | Property | Regard | Relationship | Right | Self-knowledge | Thinking | Understand |
Our problem is not, how to make the mind tranquil, still, peaceful, but, to understand, to be free from those problems which agitate the mind. The mind obviously creates the problems. If there is a problem, how do we approach it, with what attitude? How do we experience it? It is that which it is important to understand, and not, how to escape from the problem into tranquillity.
Experience | Important | Mind | Problems |
Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.
Understanding | Learn |