This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What physic, what chirurgery, what wealth, favor, authority can relieve, bear out, assuage, or expel a troubled conscience? A quiet mind cureth all.
Authority | Conscience | Mind | Quiet | Wealth |
Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah
Freedom is perhaps the most resonant, deeply held American value. In some ways, it defines the good in both personal and political life. Yet freedom turns out to mean being left alone by others, not having other people’s values, ideas, or styles of life forced upon one, being free of arbitrary authority in work, family, and political life. What it is that one might do with that freedom is much more difficult for Americans to define.
Authority | Family | Freedom | Good | Ideas | Life | Life | People | Work |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government, has a monopoly on truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put here for a reason and has something to offer.
Authority | Freedom | Government | Individual | Life | Life | Reason | Truth | World |
Can not one say with authority to the young artist, whether working in stone, in color, in tones, or in character-forms of the novel: So far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction that unless you are suffused - soul and body, one might say - with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love; that is, the love of all things in their proper relation; unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty; unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness; in a word, unless you are suffused with truth, wisdom, goodness, and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist.
Authority | Beauty | Body | Character | Hope | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Soul | Truth | Will | Wisdom |
Society - the only field where the sexes have ever met on terms of equality, the arena where character is formed and studied, the cradle and the realm of public opinion, the crucible of ideas, the world’s university, at once a school and a theater, the spur and the crown of ambition, the tribunal which unmasks pretension and stamps real merit, the power that gives government leave to be, and outruns the lazy Church in fixing the moral sense of the eye.
Ambition | Character | Church | Equality | Government | Ideas | Merit | Opinion | Power | Public | Sense | Society | World | Government |
David Eli Lilienthal, "Mr. TVA"
The essential ingredient of democracy is not doctrine but intelligence, not authority but reason, not cynicism but faith in men, faith in God. Our strength lies in the fearless pursuit of truth by the minds of men who are free.
Authority | Cynicism | Democracy | Doctrine | Faith | God | Intelligence | Men | Reason | Strength | Truth |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
While irrational faith is the acceptance of something as true only because an authority or the majority says so, rational faith is rooted in an independent conviction based upon one's own productive observing and thinking in spite of the majority's opinion.
Acceptance | Authority | Faith | Majority | Thinking |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state.
Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?
Authority | Global | Hunger | Man | Rights | System | Waste | Wealth | Woman | Child |
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
Authority | Distinction | Opinion | Order | Understanding |
Science, history and politics are not suited for discussion except by experts. Others are simply in the position of requiring more information; and, till they have acquired all available information, cannot do anything but accept on authority the opinions of those better qualified.
Authority | Better | Discussion | History | Politics | Position |
Georges Florovsky, fully Georges Vasilievich Florovsky
Orthodoxy is summoned to witness. Now more than ever the Christian West stands before divergent prospects, a living question addressed also to the Orthodox world… The ‘old polemical theology' has long ago lost its inner connection with any reality. Such theology was an academic discipline, and was always elaborated according to the same western 'textbooks.' A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious tragedy must become the new 'polemical theology.' But this tragedy must be reendured and relived, precisely as one's own, and its potential catharsis must be demonstrated in the fullness of the experience of the Church and patristic tradition. In this newly sought Orthodox synthesis, the centuries-old experience of the Catholic West must be studied and diagnosed by Orthodox theology with greater care and sympathy than has been the case up to now… The Orthodox theologian must also offer his own testimony to this world—a testimony arising from the inner memory of the Church—and resolve the question with his historical findings.
Care | Church | Experience | Memory | Question | Sympathy | Theology | Tragedy |
They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.
Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell—all these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him, or as Angelus, I think, said, "the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me."
Boldness | Church | Eternal | God | Heart | Heaven | Irony | Liberty | Man | Meaning | Present | Will | God |
The Church is not a tribe for the improvement in holiness of people who think it would be pleasant to be holy, a means to the integration of character for those who cannot bear their conflicts. It is a statement of the divine intention for humanity.
Character | Church | Improvement | Integration | Intention | Means | People | Think |