This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies in dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The church is a sort of hospital for men’s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power an authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
Authority | Individual | Power | Will |
James A. Pike, fully Bishop James Albert Pike
With us, separation of church and state was never intended to mean separation of religion from society.
It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.
Admiration | Church | Giving | Sacrifice |
Lillian Hellman, fully Lillian Florience "Lily" Hellman
I didn’t know what she was saying when she moved her lips in a Baptist church or a Catholic cathedral or, less often, in a synagogue, but it was obvious that God could be found anywhere.
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Good-breeding is the result of much good sense, some good-nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others, and with a view to obtain the same indulgence from them.
Good | Indulgence | Little | Nature | Self | Self-denial | Sense |
Only one thing can give unity in the Church on the human level: the love which allows another to be different even when it does not understand him.
Church | Love | Unity | Understand |
My parents never bound us to any church but taught us that the love of goodness was the love of God, the cheerful doing of duty made life happy, and that the love of one’s neighbor in its widest sense was the best help for oneself. Their lives showed us how lovely this simple faith was, how much honor, gratitude and affection it brought them, and what a sweet memory they left behind.
Church | Duty | Faith | God | Gratitude | Happy | Honor | Life | Life | Love | Memory | Parents | Sense |
People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
A kind of mysterious instinct is supposed to reside in the soul, that instantaneously discerns truth, without the tedious labour of ratiocination. This instinct, for I know not what other name to give it, has been termed common sense, and more frequently, sensibility; and, by a kind of indefeasible right, it has been supposed, for rights of this kind are not easily proved, to reign paramount over the other faculties of the mind, and to be an authority from which there is no appeal.
Authority | Common Sense | Instinct | Mind | Right | Rights | Sense | Sensibility | Soul | Truth |
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 |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.