This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our fortunes and lives seem chaotic when they are looked at as facts. There is order and meaning only in the great truths believed by everybody in that older wiser time of the world when things were less well known but better understood.
The poet enters into himself in order to create; the contemplative enters into God in order to be created.
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, fully Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Molke
Remember, gentlemen, an order that can be understood will be misunderstood.
There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it.
Iris Murdoch, aka Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.
Freedom | Knowing | Understanding |
Acceptance of death is acceptance of freedom – freedom to live each day with clarity and courage… If we know we are going to die, all danger disappears. There is less fear about what can go wrong, because the worst that can possibly go wrong – our own death – is completely assured. All there is left to do is live, and live well.
Acceptance | Courage | Danger | Day | Death | Fear | Freedom | Wrong | Danger |
To approach the living question with the mind alone is impossible. The intellect must be coupled with feeling in order to stir a person to authentic inquiry. Real philosophy recognizes that ideas have sensations and emotions connected with them, and that one responds to them with the whole of oneself.
Emotions | Ideas | Inquiry | Mind | Order | Philosophy | Question | Intellect |
Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini NULL
Peace cannot be limited to a mere absence of war, the result of an ever precarious balance of forces. No, peace is something built up day after day, in the pursuit of an order intended by God, which implies a more perfect form of justice among men and women.
Absence | Balance | Day | God | Justice | Men | Order | Peace | War |
We consider progress as legitimate only when it reinforces, rather than undermines, freedom and democracy.
Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?
Energy | Fear | Life | Life | Order | Pain | Past | Learn | Old |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome.
Simply to be a human being is to be a futurist of sorts. For human freedom is largely a matter of imaging alternative futures and then choosing among them.
Freedom |
Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
The Protestantism which stems from Luther has continued to concentrate its energies upon maintaining the freedom of the Word and has been inclined to yield to political and economic forces in what seem to be purely temporal matters.
Freedom |