This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Toleration… is not true liberty when it is only a gracious concession by the state to the individual. Gracious concessions are incompatible with liberty of religion which is not something that a state, or an absolutist church offers, but that which the citizen claims and the law protects.
Church | Individual | Law | Liberty | Religion | Toleration |
It is reasonable to concur where Conscience does not forbid compliance; for Conformity is at least a Civic Virtue... it is a Weakness in Religion and Government where it is carried to Things of an Indifferent Nature, since... Liberty is always the Price of it.
Compliance | Conformity | Conscience | Government | Liberty | Nature | Price | Religion | Virtue | Virtue | Weakness | Government |
Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but it is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope, armed with fire and fagot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.
Conscience | Intolerance | Liberty | Right | Toleration |
Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
The highest goal of mankind is the liberty of the individual.
Individual | Liberty | Mankind |
Freedom and Liberty are not synonyms. Freedom is an essence; Liberty, an accident. Freedom is born with a man; Liberty may be conferred upon him… Freedom is the gift of God; Liberty, the creature of society. Liberty may be taken away from a man; but on whatsoever soul Freedom may light, the course of that soul is henceforth onward and upward.
Accident | Freedom | God | Liberty | Light | Man | Society | Soul |
All who allow themselves a wrong liberty make themselves their own aim and object.
World Council of Churches NULL
Religious liberty includes freedom to change one’ religion or belief without consequent social, economic and political disabilities. Implicit in this right is the right freely to maintain one’s belief or disbelief without external coercion or disability.
Belief | Change | Coercion | Disbelief | Freedom | Liberty | Religion | Right |
Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Defense | Justice | Liberty | Moderation | Virtue | Virtue | Moderation |
The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it may be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and his country.