This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
A good society makes it possible for each person to develop the skills necessary to experience flow in socially productive activities. At the same time, it guards against anyone’s exploiting the psychic energy of another person for his or her own advantage. There is a constant watch for oppressors and parasites. According to this perspective, freedom does not apply to doing, but to being.
Energy | Experience | Freedom | Good | Society | Time | Society |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Each of us has this freedom to control our subjective reality.
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
To produce real moral freedom, God’s grace and man’s will must cooperate. As God is the Prime Mover of nature, so also he creates free impulses toward himself and to all good things. Grace renders the will free that it may do everything with God’s help, working with grace as with an instrument which belongs to it. So the will arrives at freedom through love, nay, becomes itself love, for love unites with God.
Freedom | God | Good | Grace | Love | Man | Nature | Will | God |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.
Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
As people with their freedom, the elites recognize that they cannot control the masses by force anymore; they have to control public opinions and attitudes. The more freedom you win, the more ways privileged groups—usually an amalgam of state and private powers—devise to control you.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
While freedom and equality can be legislated, brotherhood cannot. Neighborly love is a spontaneous feeling that can be affected by external information, but cannot be controlled from the outside.
Brotherhood | Equality | Freedom | Love |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Respect for the freedom of others is the highest duty of man. To love this freedom and to serve it – such is the only virtue. That is the basis of all morality; and there can be no other.
Duty | Freedom | Love | Man | Morality | Respect | Virtue | Virtue |
If we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster.
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 |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated.
Authority | Consecration | Earth | Freedom | God | Mankind | Slavery | Will |
Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
It is important to differentiate between your needs and your wants. Your needs are few, while your wants can be limitless. In order to find freedom and Bliss, minister only to your needs. Stop creating limitless wants and pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp of false happiness.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
True happiness, lasting happiness, lies only in god, “Having whom no other gain is greater.” In Him is the only safety, the only shelter, the only escape from all our fears. You have no other security in the world, no other freedom. The only true freedom lies in God.
Octavio Paz, born Octavio Paz Lozano
Our civilization has been founded on the notion of criticism: there is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science; without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
Art | Civilization | Criticism | Freedom | Literature | Nothing | Sacred | Science | Society | Art |