This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Peace is more than simply the absence of aggression and war. Peace transcends the end of a conflict or a statement of policy. While we may force the outward appearance of peace upon a people or a nation, it is the underlying thinking that must change to create a true and lasting peace.
Absence | Aggression | Appearance | Change | Force | Peace | People | Policy | Thinking | War |
Let us be clear: censorship is cowardice… It masks corruption. It is a school of torture: its teaches, and accustoms one to the use of force against an idea, to submit thought to an alien “other.” But worst still, censorship destroys criticism, which is the essential ingredient of culture.
Corruption | Cowardice | Criticism | Culture | Force | Thought | Torture | Thought |
I cannot love God without devoting my whole heart as living for the sake of my fellow-men, without devoting my entire soul as responsive to all the spiritual trends in the world around me, without devoting all my force to this God in His correlation with man.
Force | God | Heart | Love | Man | Men | Soul | World | God |
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitutes true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
Art | Beauty | Existence | Experience | Fear | Good | Knowledge | Man | Mystery | Reason | Religion | Science | Sense | Wonder | Art |
According to the laws of probability, the time it would take to produce a single molecule of a moderate degree of dissymmetry on a globe the size of the earth would be about 10243 Billions of years, whereas by the most recent calculations, based on radioactivity, the earth is estimate to have been in existence for only 2 billion years… the properties of a cell are born out of the co-ordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous co-ordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.
I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence - as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
Eternity | Existence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Mystery | Nature | Reason | Sense | Understand |
All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.
Character | Existence | Greatness | Individuality | Man | Mediocrity | Will |
If humanity wishes to strive to exist and if it wishes happiness and prosperity, then it must have mutual friendship and ought not to rely upon force for mutual extermination.
Force | Humanity | Prosperity | Wishes | Friendship | Happiness |
Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole
Whether on the floor of Congress or in the boardrooms of corporate America or in the corridors of a big city hospital, there is no body of professional expertise and no anthology of case studies which can supplant the force of character which provides both a sense of direction and a means of fulfillment. It asks, now what you want to be, but who you want to be.
The search for final truth rests with each individual personality and rendering the partial interpretations of our experience fundamentally consistent with one another. It is this fact that justifies the use of the word `God’ to designate the all embracing personality in whose existence ultimate reality exists.
Existence | Experience | God | Individual | Personality | Reality | Search | Truth |
What is important and of greatest significance is that an ideal of final truth is always before use and that the search for truth is acknowledged by all men as a duty not imposed from outside but born from within. The search for final truth rests with each individual personality and rendering the partial interpretations of our experience fundamentally consistent with one another. It is this fact that justifies the use of the word `God’ to designate the all embracing personality in whose existence ultimate reality exists.
Duty | Existence | Experience | God | Important | Individual | Men | Personality | Reality | Search | Truth |
The free man acts morally because he has a moral idea. He does not act in order that morality may come into being. A moral idea, born of intuition without compulsion, inner or outer, would be at one and the same time the highest motive and the highest driving force in man.
Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. What man's mind can create, man's character can control.
Character | Day | Death | Force | Man | Mind | Order | Science | Torture | War | Will |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Love is the subtlest force in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
The spirit of nonresistance… is the greatest force because it is the highest expression of the soul.
Most often faith is understood as belief in certain propositional, doctrinal formulations that in some essential ands static way are supposed to “contain” truth. But if faith is relational, a pledging of trust and fidelity to another, and a way of moving into the force field of life trusting in dynamic center of value and power, then the “truth” of faith takes on a different quality. Truth is lived: it is a pattern of being in relation to others and to God. In this light, doctrines and creeds come to be seen as playing a different though still crucial role. Rather than being the repositories of truth, like treasure chests to be honored and assented to, they becomes guides for the construction of contemporary ways of seeing and being.
Belief | Dynamic | Faith | Fidelity | Force | God | Life | Life | Light | Power | Trust | Truth | Value |
Faith is people’s evolved and evolving ways of experiencing self, others and world (as they construct them) as related to and affected by the ultimate conditions of existence (as they construct them) and of shaping their lives’ purposes and meaning, trusts and loyalties, in light of the character of being, value and power determining the ultimate conditions of existence (as grasped in their operative images – conscious and unconscious of them).
Character | Existence | Faith | Light | Meaning | People | Power | Self | World | Value |