This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
It is my own firm belief that the strength of the soul grows in proportion as you subdue the flesh.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I shall have the belief that I can do it. I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it, even if I may not have it at the beginning.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for the suppression of reason, but for a due recognition of that in us which sanctifies reason.
Omnipotence | Reason | Suppression | Worship |
My reluctance to enter into religious controversies has never been the result of fear or weakness, however. I may say that I did not start examining my religion only yesterday. Indeed, early on, I recognized it as a duty to examine my opinions and acts, and if, since my youth, I have dedicated my leisure hours to worldly wisdom and the humanities, it was solely with the intention of preparing myself for this necessary [self-] examination. I could have had no other motives for this. In my situation I could not expect the slightest temporal advantage from such studies. I knew well that I could not prosper in worldly affairs in this way. And as for pleasure? Therefore, as you see, had I lacked a sincere belief in my own religion, the result of my inquiries would have made itself visible in a public act. But because [those inquiries] strengthened me in my fathers' [religion], I was able to continue quietly on my way without having to account for my convictions to the world.
Belief | Convictions | Duty | Fear | Intention | Leisure | Motives | Public | Religion | Wisdom |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
It is beyond my power to induce in you a belief in God. There are certain things which are self proved and certain which are not proved at all. The existence of God is like a geometrical axiom. It may be beyond our heart grasp. I shall not talk of an intellectual grasp. Intellectual attempts are more or less failures, as a rational explanation cannot give you the faith in a living God. For it is a thing beyond the grasp of reason. It transcends reason. There are numerous phenomena from which you can reason out the existence of God, but I shall not insult your intelligence by offering you a rational explanation of that type. I would have you brush aside all rational explanations and begin with a simple childlike faith in God. If I exist, God exists. With me it is a necessity of my being as it is with millions. They may not be able to talk about it, but from their life you can see that it is a part of their life. I am only asking you to restore the belief that has been undermined. In order to do so, you have to unlearn a lot of literature that dazzles your intelligence and throws you off your feet. Start with the faith which is also a token of humility and an admission that we know nothing, that we are less than atoms in this universe. We are less than atoms, I say, because the atom obeys the law of its being, whereas we in the insolence of our ignorance deny the law of nature. But I have no argument to address to those who have no faith.
Argument | Belief | Existence | Faith | God | Heart | Humility | Ignorance | Insult | Intelligence | Law | Life | Life | Literature | Necessity | Order | Phenomena | Power | Reason | Self | Insult | God |
This is the old fear …. that truth will not prevail, that the moral structure of a nation is so fragile that it needs elaborate defences. Christians, it seems to me, have to choose between the safety of ‘morals’ and the danger of love. It is my own belief that Christ’s teaching was principally about the latter, but that if you do teach men and women to love God and love their neighbours then morals take care of themselves.
Belief | Care | Danger | Fear | God | Love | Men | Teach | Truth | Will | Danger | God | Old |
Moshé Feldenkreis, fully Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais
Nothing is permanent about our behavior patterns except our belief that they are so.
Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
The Ten Mohist Doctrines [paraphrase] As their movement developed, the Mohists came to present themselves as offering a collection of ten key doctrines, divided into five pairs. The ten doctrines correspond to the titles of the ten triads, the ten sets of three essays that form the core of the Mozi. Although the essays in each triad differ in detail, the gist of each doctrine may be briefly summarized as follows. “Elevating the Worthy” and “Conforming Upward.” The purpose of government is to achieve a stable social, economic, and political order (zhi, pronounced “jr”) by promulgating a unified conception of morality (yi). This task of moral education is to be carried out by encouraging everyone to “conform upward” to the good example set by social and political superiors and by rewarding those who do so and punishing those who do not. Government is to be structured as a centralized, bureaucratic state led by a virtuous monarch and managed by a hierarchy of appointed officials. Appointments are to be made on the basis of competence and moral merit, without regard for candidates' social status or origins. “Inclusive Care” and “Rejecting Aggression.” To achieve social order and exemplify the key virtue of ren (humanity, goodwill), people must inclusively care for each other, having as much concern for others' lives, families, and communities as for their own, and in their relations with others seek to benefit them. Military aggression is wrong for the same reasons that theft, robbery, and murder are: it harms others in pursuit of selfish benefit, while ultimately failing to benefit Heaven, the spirits, or society as a whole. “Thrift in Utilization” and “Thrift in Funerals.” To benefit society and care for the welfare of the people, wasteful luxury and useless expenditures must be eliminated. Seeking always to bring wealth to the people and order to society, the ren (humane) person avoids wasting resources on extravagant funerals and prolonged mourning (which were the custom in ancient China). “Heaven's Intention” and “Elucidating Ghosts.” Heaven is the noblest, wisest moral agent, so its intention is a reliable, objective standard of what is morally right (yi) and must be respected. Heaven rewards those who obey its intention and punishes those who defy it, hence people should strive to be humane and do what is right. Social and moral order (zhi) can be advanced by encouraging belief in ghosts and spirits who reward the good and punish the wicked. “Rejecting Music” and “Rejecting Fatalism.” The humane (ren) person opposes the extravagant musical entertainment and other luxuries enjoyed by rulers and high officials, because these waste resources that could otherwise be used for feeding and clothing the common people. Fatalism is not ren, because by teaching that our lot in life is predestined and human effort is useless, it interferes with the pursuit of economic wealth, a large population, and social order (three primary goods that the humane person desires for society). Fatalism fails to meet a series of justificatory criteria and so must be rejected.
Aggression | Belief | Care | Competence | Custom | Doctrine | Education | Effort | Entertainment | Example | Good | Government | Heaven | Intention | Life | Life | Luxury | Morality | Mourning | Murder | Order | People | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Regard | Reward | Right | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Waste | Wealth | Wrong | Society | Government | Murder |
I've known a lot of people who do not believe in God who have come to Judaism for other reasons, such as a relationship or a philosophical view that drew them in. One of the strange and miraculous things about Jewish practice is that it seems to engender belief. People wonder, "Why does Chabad ask passersby to put on tefillin?" It seems that there's this almost magical effect to it. The mitzvah not only provokes spiritual questions, but engenders a longing for belief, and ultimately belief itself. So even though, theologically, Judaism without God doesn't make sense, I would say that, as a practice, Judaism can begin in non-belief but conclude in belief. For me, authenticity means truth. It means connecting with a revelation that happened in the past. If there's any hope for Judaism at all, it lies in the belief that Judaism goes back to Moses and Mount Sinai. Otherwise, Judaism is just a fraud, an illusion.
Authenticity | Belief | God | Hope | Longing | Means | People | Practice | Relationship | Revelation | God |
Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.
It's the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.
Belief |
Down the millennia of its existence, Hinduism has made a priceless contribution to the collective religious life of mankind through the remarkable findings of her many brilliant mystics and philosophers, as set forth in a voluminous literature. Perhaps, however, her most significant contribution to the universal body of religious inquiry is the persistent, unshakable belief that union with the Divine is attainable while one is still on earth. Moreover, any man in India is at liberty to pursue salvation after his own fashion with no danger of finding himself at some point branded as heretic. Indeed, heresy in Hinduism is virtually impossible, for as the authoritative Upanishads firmly state: “Reality of One though sages call it by different names.
Belief | Body | Danger | Inquiry | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Mankind | Salvation | Danger |
Self-esteem is the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. It consists of two components: 1) self-efficacy—confidence in our ability to think, learn, choose, and make appropriate decisions; and 2) self-respect—confidence in our right to be happy; and in the belief that achievement, success, friendship, respect, love and fulfillment are appropriate to us.
Ability | Belief | Experience | Fulfillment | Life | Life | Love | Right |
In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.
Belief | Conformity | Family | Self-esteem |
It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize. He paused. And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
Belief | Confidence | Deeds | Life | Life | Nobility | Reality | Soul | Will | Deeds |
Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld
Psychoanalysis arrived to save the human soul in a materialistic era sick with self-consciousness and threatened by loss of belief in immortality and in its public expression, religion. Its greatness resides in having done this in the mind-set of our era, not simply symbolizing the soul exoterically or concretizing it socially as in the past, but attempting to demonstrate it scientifically. But realistic psychology is the death knell of the soul, whose source, nature, and value lie precisely in the abstract, the unfathomable, and the esoteric.
Belief | Death | Era | Greatness | Immortality | Psychology | Public | Soul | Loss | Value |
There is no consensus yet about the details of the scientific image of persons. But there is broad agreement about how we must construct this detailed picture. First, we will need to demythologize persons by rooting out certain unfounded ideas from the perennial philosophy. Letting go of the belief in souls is a minimal requirement. In fact, desouling is the primary operation of the scientific image. "First surgery," we might call it. There are no such things as souls, or nonphysical minds. If such things did exist, as perennial philosophy conceives them, science would be unable to explain persons. But there aren't, so it can. Second, we will need to think of persons as part of nature — as natural creatures completely obedient and responsive to natural law. The traditional religious view positions humans on the Great Chain of Being between animals on one side and angels and God on the other. This set of beliefs needs to be replaced. There are no angels, nor gods, and there is nothing — at least, no higher beings — for humans to be in-between. Humans don't possess some animal parts or instincts. We are animals. A complex and unusual animal, but at the end of the day, another animal.
Angels | Belief | God | Ideas | Nature | Need | Nothing | Philosophy | Science | Will | God | Think |