This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
Authority | Ethics | Immortality | Individual |
Freethinkers are those who reach judgment based on critical thinking and independent reasoning without regard to prevailing authority and tradition.
Authority | Critical thinking | Judgment | Regard | Thinking | Tradition | Critical Thinking |
Damon Keith, fully Damon Jerome Keith
A government operating in the shadow of secrecy stands in complete opposition to the society envisioned by the framers of our Constitution.
Government | Opposition | Secrecy | Society | Society | Government |
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.
Robert C. Savage, fully Robert Carlton Savage
You can measure a man by the opposition it takes to discourage him.
Man | Opposition |
It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition to stand up for it.
Enough | Men | Opposition | Truth | Wise |
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
The individual freedoms destroyed by the increase in national authority have been in the main the freedom to deny black Americans their elementary rights as citizens, the freedom to work little children in mills... the freedom to pay starvation wages... the freedom to... pollute the environment - all freedoms that, one supposes, a civilized country can readily do without
Authority | Children | Freedom | Individual | Little | Rights | Work |
The authority of reason is far more imperious than that of a master; for he who disobeys the one is unhappy, but he who disobeys the other is a fool.
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."