This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is not causality that freedom is to be contrasted with, but constraint.
Constraint | Freedom |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
He produces not only our choice, but also the very freedom that is in our chance... In order to understand that God creates our free will in us, we must understand only that He wills us to be free. But He will not only that we should be free in power, but that we should be free in its exercise.
Chance | Choice | Free will | Freedom | God | Order | Power | Will | Wills | God | Understand |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
It is in consciousness that freedom lies.
Consciousness | Freedom |
Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into real improvement of living conditions.
Better | Children | Fighting | Future | Ideas | Improvement | Men | Order | Peace | People | Progress | Struggle | Words |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
The ability to become bamboo is a metaphor for reaching beyond the perceptual, intellectual, and feeling habits, expectations, and assumptions of your own psyche and traditions in order to allow the embracing and the understanding of those of another. In actually becoming bamboo it is essential to listen to another with an open mind and heart, and thereby to embrace what you were previously unwilling or unable genuinely to encounter.
Ability | Heart | Mind | Order | Understanding |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
In order to live we must decide on one course of action rather than another, moment by moment. We declare our values and take our stands in both small ways and large. Were we to admit that we are never certain that we have chosen correctly, and never reassured that this chosen course was the correct course of action, then we would be open to the unending exploration and revision in our way of living. We would have learned to put our prejudices and assumptions, our convictions and beliefs at risk.
Action | Convictions | Order | Risk |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
With freedom goes responsibility, and from responsibility comes the possibility of life enrichment.
Freedom | Life | Life | Responsibility |
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
Education should be constructed on two bases: morality and prudence. Morality in order to assist virtue, and prudence in order to defend you against the vices of others. In tipping the scales toward morality, you merely produce dupes and martyrs. In tipping it the other way, you produce egotistical schemers.
Education | Martyrs | Morality | Order | Prudence | Prudence | Virtue | Virtue |
The attraction of one creature for another, even when condemned by reason for its passionate origin, is always worthy of respect, because it reveals to us something of the order of creation.
If justice prevails, good faith is found in treaties, truth in transaction, order in government, the earth is at peace, and heaven itself sheds overus its beneficent light and radiates down to us its blessed influence.
Earth | Faith | Good | Government | Heaven | Influence | Justice | Light | Order | Peace | Truth | Blessed |
Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
Without freedom there is no foundation for our Empire; without Empire there is no safeguard for our freedom.
Freedom |
The temptation of Protestantism has always been to magnify freedom at the expense of unity. The temptation of Roman Catholicism, on the other hand, has been to magnify unity at the expense of freedom.
Freedom | Temptation | Unity | Temptation |
To be free from everything is to be - nothing. Only nothing is quite free, and freedom is abstract nothingness.
Theologians have always recognized that passions may overwhelm the person suddenly and completely to the pint where freedom of choice does not exist and responsibility is not present.
Choice | Freedom | Present | Responsibility |
You don't have to hold a position in order to be a leader.