This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
The beautiful is what pleases in the mere judgment (and therefore not by the medium of sensation in accordance with a concept of the understanding). It follows at once from this that it must please apart from all interest. The sublime is what pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense.
Judgment | Opposition | Sense | Understanding |
Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
Without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue. You have to have courage – courage of different kinds: first, intellectual courage, to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one which is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage to stick up to that – no matter what comes in your way, no matter what the obstacle and the opposition is.
Courage | Mind | Opposition | Practice | Right | Virtue | Virtue | Obstacle |
Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.
Ideas | Opposition | Reflection |
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.
The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority - demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness to sacrifice - comes graceful and beloved as a bride.
Bride | Majority | Men | Opposition | Prudence | Prudence | Sacrifice | Thrift | Crisis |
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 |