This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Like every good teacher, authority should labor to render itself useless.
There is an inevitable tension between mysticism and religious orthodoxy… For the mystic, whatever his professed creed, final authority lies in his own experience.
Authority | Creed | Experience | Inevitable | Mysticism |
Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
In times of prosperity the church administers; in times of adversity the church shepherds.
Adversity | Church | Prosperity |
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 |
George Sand, pen name for Amandine Lucte Aurore Dupin, Baronne Dudevant
One is happy as a result of one's own efforts, once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness - simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial top a point, love of work, and above all a clear conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.
Conscience | Courage | Happy | Love | Self | Self-denial | Work | Happiness |
And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.
Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
If there should be any [persons], who though ignorant in Mathematics, yet pretending a skill in those Learnings, should dare, upon the authority of some place of Scripture wrested to their purpose, to condemn and censure my Hypothesis, I value them not, but shall slight their inconsiderate judgment.
Authority | Censure | Hypothesis | Judgment | Mathematics | Purpose | Purpose | Scripture | Skill | Value |
Reason provides a means of escaping from the constraints of belief-systems backed by authority and from the resentment which clever people feel at the power of their own passions. Because reason--in admittedly varying degrees--is available to everybody, it has a potential advantage over the truth you feel and the truth you are told.
Authority | Belief | Means | People | Power | Reason | Resentment | Truth |
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
Authority | Ethics | Immortality | Individual |
As we have seen over and over again, whenever church and state enter into partnership, human freedom is restricted, intellectual growth is stifled, and education is formalized and routinized to exclude and smother innovation and creativity.
Church | Creativity | Education | Freedom | Growth | Innovation |
Freethinkers are those who reach judgment based on critical thinking and independent reasoning without regard to prevailing authority and tradition.
Authority | Critical thinking | Judgment | Regard | Thinking | Tradition | Critical Thinking |
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.