This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If you pursue happiness as the ultimate goal of your living, you will be drifting away from happiness and your real being. Happiness is not a transcendental state of mind that is very difficult to have. It is the joyful expression of enlightened mind and is born of unconditional love.
Charles De Montesquieu, formally Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
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 |
Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
Universal love… means that one makes no distinction between the state of others and one’s own; none between the houses of other and one’s own; none between the other person and oneself.
Distinction | Love | Means |
Most religions are absolutist. Claims to revelation militate against rational argument and compromise. In this sense all religions contain totalitarian possibilities; for totalitarianism, which welds the state into a single body “knit together as one man” is really the religious impulse, the worship of leadership and ideology, the cult of Person or Book, directed towards secular ends.
Argument | Body | Cult | Ends | Impulse | Man | Revelation | Sense | Worship | Leadership |
Man is but a short, critical stage between the animal and the spiritual. His state is one of constant wavering, of soaring and descending. Undeviating humanity is nonexistent. The emancipated man is yet to emerge.
Temporality and uninterruptedness express the relation of existence to time, a passive relation. What distinguishes organic from inorganic existence is the fact that the plant or the animal stands in an active and defensive relation to temporality… Life, we know from biology, is not a passive state of indifference, and inertia. The essence of life is intense care and concern.
Care | Existence | Indifference | Life | Life | Organic | Time |
Robert Edward Rubin, aka Eddy Rubin
In business, the chief focus is on profitability. Government, by contrast, has no simple bottom line but rather a vast array of interests and priorities, many of which exist in a state of tension or conflict. For that reason, decision making in government is vastly more complex.
Business | Contrast | Decision | Focus | Government | Reason | Government |
N. Sri Ram, fully Nilakanta Sri Ram or Nilakantha Sri Ram
The state of love is a state of grace.
Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness; it sells the country to softness and vanity, and takes away from the state all its citizens, to make them slaves one to another, and one and all to public opinion.
The adult works to perfect his environment, whereas the child works to perfect himself, using the environment as the means… The child is a being in a constant state of transformation.
B. F. Skinner, fully Burrhus Frederic "B.F." Skinner
There are no limits to perfection. The human species will never reach a final state of perfection before it is exterminated.
Perfection | Will |
Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II
The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions… In Hinduism, men probe the mystery of God and express it with a rich fund of myths, and a penetrating philosophy… In the various forms of Buddhism the basic inadequacy of this changing world is recognized and men are taught with confident application how they can achieve a state of complete liberation… The Church also regards with esteem the Muslims who worship the one, subsistent, merciful and almighty God… They venerate Jesus as a prophet… Given the great spiritual heritage common to Christians and Jews, it is the wish of this sacred Council to foster and recommend a mutual knowledge and esteem.
Church | Esteem | God | Knowledge | Men | Mystery | Nothing | Philosophy | Sacred | World | Worship | God |
The glories of our blood and state are shadows, not substantial things; there is no armor against fate; death lays his icy hand on kings, sceptre and crown must tumble down, and in the dust be equal made with the poor crooked scythe and spade.
Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.
Regret |
Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Tolle
The primary factor in creation is consciousness. Our state of consciousness creates our world. Consciousness itself is timeless and therefore does not evolve. Consciousness is the intelligence, the organizing principle behind the arising of form. Although the unmanifested realm of pure consciousness could be considered another dimension, it is not separate from this dimension of form. Form and formlessness interpenetrate. The unmanifested flows into this dimension as awareness, inner space, Presence.
Awareness | Consciousness | Intelligence | Space | World |