This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To make the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education , to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, sobriety, parsimony, justice; not to admire wealth or honor; to hate turbulence and ambition; to place every one his private welfare and happiness in the public peace, liberty and safety.
Ambition | Education | Faith | Hate | Honor | Justice | Liberty | Modesty | Peace | People | Public | Teach | Virtue | Virtue | Wealth | Will | Happiness |
Give me the liberty to know, to think, to believe, and to utter freely, according to conscience, above all other liberties.
Conscience | Liberty |
Virtue cannot be fully attained without liberty and the absence of liberty proves that virtue in its full protection is wanting. Therefore a man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish.
The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.
Antagonism | Eternal | Liberty | Love | Power |
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection... The only purpose of which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
Action | Harm | Liberty | Mankind | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Will |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Evil | Experience | Freedom | Government | Liberty | Meaning | Men | Teach | Understanding | Zeal |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties… They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak
Courage | Freedom | Liberty | Means | Men | Will | Happiness | Think |
Let your cry be for free souls rather than for freedom. Moral liberty is the only really important liberty.
Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
The search for truth should be the goal of our activities; it is the sole end worthy of them. Doubtless we should first bend our efforts to assuage human suffering, but why? Not to suffer is a negative ideal more surely attained by the annihilation of the world. If we wish more and more to free man from material cares, it is that he may be able to employ the liberty obtained in the study and contemplation of truth.
Contemplation | Liberty | Man | Search | Study | Suffering | Truth | World | Contemplation |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual through liberty and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.
Attainment | Democracy | Good | Ideals | Individual | Justice | Liberty |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Peace is liberty in tranquillity.
Liberty | Peace | Tranquility |
The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion. Not only to find oneself tyrannized over and outraged is a defeat to this instinct, but in general, to feel oneself over-tutored, over-governed, sate upon (as the popular phrase is) by authority, is a defeat to it.
Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
There is no greater robber in this world than he who robs us of our liberty of thought.
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
The state is the sum of all the negations of the individual liberty of all its members; or rather that of the sacrifices which all its members make, in renouncing one portion of their liberty to the profit of the common good.
Good | Individual | Liberty |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
One difficulty about achieving social improvement is that we tend to uncritically regard any advance in either differentiation or in integration as a good thing. If a new law increases freedom, it must be progress, as is a new movement that fosters the feeling of solidarity among people. yet neither of these programs is likely to improve matters without the complementary contribution of the other. Complexity requires the synergy of these dialectically opposed force; a gain in only one is likely to promote confusion and chaos. We think of social entropy as being caused by a loss of liberty or a loss of common values; but gains in either at the expense of its complement are just as dangerous.
Difficulty | Force | Freedom | Good | Improvement | Integration | Law | Liberty | People | Progress | Regard | Loss | Think |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.
Challenge | Freedom | Liberty | Oppression | Poverty | Right | Time | War |