This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.
Nothing destroyeth authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power pressed too far, and relaxed too much.
Every great example takes hold of us with the authority of a miracle, and says to us, "If ye had but faith, ye, also, could do the same things."
Galileo Galilei, known simply as Galileo
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth that humble reasoning of a single individual.
Authority | Individual | Science | Worth |
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
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 |
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.
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 |