This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Faith is by its nature non-rational. Having faith does not in any way remove responsibility for one’s own ethical and existential decisions. Faith is about `opting out’ of the need for rational justification rather than a deliberate attempt to act contrary to reason.
Faith | Justification | Nature | Need | Reason | Responsibility |
The clarity of expectation produces Whitmore’s twin performance pillars of greater responsibility and awareness.
Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
We are fully responsible for who it is that we become. In the final analysis, there is no one else to blame. It is totally our own doing. We are always already free to remake our present and future by disencumbering ourselves of unwanted and unhelpful aspects of our past history. Freedom, choice, and responsibility are the ethical watchwords of existentialism.
Blame | Choice | Existentialism | Freedom | Future | History | Past | Present | Responsibility |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
With freedom goes responsibility, and from responsibility comes the possibility of life enrichment.
Freedom | Life | Life | Responsibility |
Theologians have always recognized that passions may overwhelm the person suddenly and completely to the pint where freedom of choice does not exist and responsibility is not present.
Choice | Freedom | Present | Responsibility |
The apportioning of blame [is] the means by which society obtains a modicum of revenge for the wrong it has suffered, expiates its own guilt for such responsibility as it may have had for the event in question, and finally seeks to prevent a repetition of the disaster.
Blame | Guilt | Means | Question | Responsibility | Revenge | Society | Wrong | Society |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Disagreement alone can provide alternatives to a decision. And a decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw, no matter how carefully thought through it might be.
Decision | Disagreement | Thought | Thought |
Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat
The moral goodness of man, the necessary consequence of his constitution, is capable of indefinite perfection like all his other faculties, and nature has linked together in an unbreakable chain truth, happiness and virtue.
Man | Nature | Perfection | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |
The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.
Civilization | Faith | Grace | Mankind | Race | Receive | Responsibility |
In your daily life, you can treat people you meet in a way that strengthens them in spirit through genuine interest or respect… not a patronizing or false sense of sincerity… but rather a genuine curiosity and respect for each individual you meet… Your actions do make a lasting impact on each person you encounter. It’s an enormous responsibility to take seriously how you treat the people in your life, and a great joy to know you have acted with caring, warmth, and love.
Curiosity | Individual | Joy | Life | Life | Love | People | Respect | Responsibility | Sense | Sincerity | Spirit | Respect |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Self-sacrifice of one innocent man is a million times more potent than the sacrifice of a million men who die in the act of killing others.
Man | Men | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice |
If, as Heraclitus said, “A man’s character is his fate” – that is, if our fate is largely determined by the habitual tendencies of our repetition compulsion-personality – then the power of consciousness is that it allows us to change impulses, we have what Kierkegaard called “the possibility of possibility”: the possibility of having a free choice and the moral responsibility that comes with it. In that sense, the fear of consciousness is ultimately the fear of moral responsibility, because if we own our anxiety, shame, and guilt, and allow ourselves to have full consciousness of emotions that motivate our behavior, then we will inevitably recognize the full weight of our responsibility for that behavior.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Behavior | Change | Character | Choice | Consciousness | Emotions | Fate | Fear | Free choice | Guilt | Man | Personality | Power | Responsibility | Sense | Shame | Will | Fate |
I believe that our choice between two models of psychiatry is really a choice between two competing sets of moral values that will ultimately determine the kind of society we live in. One is the Psychotherapeutic Model’s ideal of healing the soul with its values of self-awareness, autonomy, personal growth, an I-Thou spirit of love, respect, and compassion for others, and an acceptance of moral responsibility for our own egoistic impulses and emotions. The other is the Medical Model’s ideal of quick fix, with its swimming-pool values of stability and conformity, and an I-It orientation toward material success and other superficial addictive pleasures
Acceptance | Awareness | Choice | Compassion | Conformity | Emotions | Growth | Love | Model | Respect | Responsibility | Self | Self-awareness | Society | Soul | Spirit | Success | Will | Society |