This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. But logic is not all; one needs one's heart to follow an idea. If people are going back to religion, what are they going back to? Is the modern church a place to give comfort to a man who doubts God
Church | Comfort | God | Heart | Logic | Man | People | God |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. Neither in a public way. You know what happened to the popes? They were layin' the nuns; that's been goin' on for years, centuries. But the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual, and it had to be cleaned out. That's what's happened to Britain. It happened earlier to France. Let's look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn, they root 'em out. They don't let 'em around at all. I don't know what they do with them. Look at this country. You think the Russians allow dope? Homosexuality, dope, immorality, are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and left-wingers are clinging to one another. They're trying to destroy us. I know Moynihan will disagree with this, [Attorney General John] Mitchell will, and Garment will. But, goddamn, we have to stand up to this.
Naked anger may sometimes be seen in priests of the Church of Rome, but the Church of England prefers the icy smile, the false bonhomie, the sword concealed in the palm-branch.
Roger Schutz, aka Frère Roger, Brother Roger of Taize, baptised Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche
When the Church listens, it cures, it reconciles, it becomes what it is in the most luminiscent of itself: vivid reflex of love.
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Roland B. Gittelsohn, fully Roland Bertram Gittelsohn
I think there is a form of spiritual as well as clinical schizophrenia abroad in the land. I find it when I see men who check their reason and all empirical evidence when they enter a church or synagogue, and I find it in men who forget everything they have learned about faith when they enter a laboratory or a physician’s office. I think they are almost equally derelict in their approach to the human being.
Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II
Whatever were our opinions about the Council’s various doctrines before its conclusions were promulgated, today our adherence to the decisions of the Council must be wholehearted and without reserve;…. …The council was something very new; not all were prepared to understand and accept it. But now the conciliar doctrines must be seen as belonging to the magisterium of the Church and, indeed be attributed to the breath of the Holy Spirit.
Body | Church | Day | Doctrine | Faith | Life | Life | Man | Mother | Sacred | Truth |
Sen T’Sen, aka Seng T'San, Jianzhi Sengcan, Kanchi Sosan, Third Chinese Patriarch of Zen
The Perfect Way knows no difficulties, Except that it refuses to make preferences. Only when freed from hate and love Does it reveal itself fully and without disguise. A tenth of an inch's difference, And heaven and earth are set apart. If you wish to see it before your own eyes, Have no fixed thoughts either for or against it. To set up what you like against what you dislike - This is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of the Way is not understood, Peace of mind is disturbed to no purpose... Pursue not the outer entanglements, Dwell not in the inner void; Be serene in the oneness of things, And dualism vanishes of itself. When you strive to gain quiescence by stopping motion, The quiescence so gained is ever in motion. So long as you tarry in such dualism, How can you realize oneness? And when oneness is not thoroughly grasped, Loss is sustained in two ways: The denying of external reality is the assertion of it, And the assertion of Emptiness (the Absolute) is the denying of it... Transformations going on in the empty world that confronts us Appear to be real because of Ignorance. Do not strive to seek after the True, Only cease to cherish opinions. The two exist because of the One; But hot not even to this One. When a mind is not disturbed, The ten thousand things offer no offense... If an eye never falls asleep, All dreams will cease of themselves; If the Mind retains its absoluteness, The ten thousand things are of one substance. When the deep mystery of Suchness is fathomed, All of a sudden we forget the external entanglements; When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness, We return to the origin and remain where we have always been... One in all, All in One - If only this is realized, No more worry about not being perfect! When Mind and each believing mind are not divided, And undivided are each believing mind and Mind, This is where words fail, For it is not of the past, present or future.
Church | Commitment | Dignity | Duty | Experience | Grace | Individual | Life | Life | Openness | Understand |
Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II
As a simple example of what We mean, consider the extremely critical problems which exist today in the political and economic spheres. Men are so worried by these things that they give scant thought to those religious concerns, which are the province of the Church's teaching authority. All this is evil, and we are right to condemn it. But this new state of affairs has at least one undeniable advantage: it has eliminated the innumerable obstacles erected by worldly men to impede the Church's freedom of action. We have only to take a cursory glance through the annals of the Church to realize that even those ecumenical councils which are recorded there in letters of gold, were celebrated in the midst of serious difficulties and most distressing circumstances, through the unwarranted intervention of the civil authority. Such intervention was sometimes dictated by a sincere intention on the part of the secular princes to protect the Church's interests, but more often than not their motives were purely political and selfish, and the resultant situation was fraught with spiritual disadvantage and danger.
Appreciation | Church | Confidence | Energy | Future | Light | Nations | System | Will | Appreciation |
Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II
No Council [Vatican II] has ever spoken so clearly about Christian Unity, about dialogue with non-Christian religions… about the dignity of each person’s conscience, about the principle of religious liberty, about the different cultural traditions within which the Church carries out her missionary mandate… ‘The best preparation for the new millennium, therefore, can only be expressed in a renewed commitment to apply, as faithfully as possible, the teachings of Vatican II to the life of every individual and of the whole Church... In the common experience of humanity, for all its contradictions, the Spirt of God, who “ blows where he wills”, not infrequently reveals signs of his presence which help Christ’s followers to understand more deeply the message which they bear. Was it not with this humble and trust-filled openness that the Second Vatican Council sought to read the signs of the times?... What a treasure there is, dear brothers and sisters, in the guidelines offered to us by the Second Vatican Council… I feel more than ever in duty bound to point to the Council as the great grace bestowed on the Church in the twentieth century’ there we find a sure compass by which to take our bearings in the century now beginning.
Church | Understand |
The parent's job year in and year out, here a little and there a little, is to build up a disposition of good sportsmanship, of taking one's medicine, of facing the music, of being reviled and reviling not. This sense of not always being right, of recognition that perhaps we've made a mistake, seems left out of some grown-up children.
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Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II
It demonstrates how we must conduct this mortal life of ours. If we are to achieve God's purpose in our regard we have a twofold obligation: as citizens of earth, and as citizens of heaven. That is to say, all men without exception, both individually and in society, have a life-long obligation to strive after heavenly values through the right use of the things of this earth. These temporal goods must be used in such a way as not to jeopardize eternal happiness.
Church | Example | Freedom | Intention | Men | Motives | Problems | Right | Thought | Thought |
Anthony Kenny, fully Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny
A proponent of the Big Bang Theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing.
Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
We must eradicate from the soul all fear and terror of what comes towards Man, out of the future. We must acquire serenity in all feelings and sensations about the future. We must look forward with absolute equanimity to everything that may come. And we must think only that whatever comes is given to us by a world-directive full of wisdom. It is part of what we must learn in this age, namely, to live out of pure trust, without any security in existence - trust in the ever-present help of the spiritual world. Truly, nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail us. And let us seek the awakening from within ourselves, every morning and every evening.
Art | Church | Consciousness | Dependence | Evolution | Listening | Religion | Revelation | Sacred | Unity | Words | Art |
Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their mothers.
Church | Control | Man | Power | Providence |
The worst of all of this is the lie that condoms really protect against AIDS. The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent. Would you get on a plane — or put your children on a plane — if one of five passengers would be killed on the flight? Well, the statistic holds for condoms, folks.
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The body of the Word, then, being a real human body, in spite of its having been uniquely formed from a virgin, was of itself mortal and, like other bodies, liable to death. But the indwelling of the Word loosed it from this natural liability, so that corruption could not touch it. Thus is happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord's body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished.
Church | Faith | God | Good | Jealousy | Present | Reality | Struggle | Time | Will | Worship | God |