This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Behavior | Death | Education | Fear | Hope | Man | Punishment | Reward | Sympathy |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
Gian Galeazzo Ciano, 2nd Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari
As always, victory finds a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.
Defeat |
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 |
Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré
God, the Ground of Being, the Spirit Creator of all being, creates because he is love. Therefore he creates finite persons who are spirits, but have being, that they might learn to love. To learn to love man needs genuine self-being, genuine freedom; therefore man is put in an indirect relation to God within a pedagogical process where he can go his own partial, rebellious and faithless way until he discover, through fear and frustration, indeed through all the opposite experiences from Love, that God’s way, the way of love, is alone in accordance with man’s deepest nature and alone can satisfy his deepest needs.
Fear | Freedom | God | Love | Man | Nature | Self | Spirit | God | Learn |
J. W. Fulbright, fully James William Fulbright
We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about the 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
Action | Dissent | Fear | Thinking | World | Learn | Think |
The food of events is thought. Your habitual thoughts nourish your conditions and cause them to increase and multiply. Fear thoughts, gloomy and critical thoughts, selfish thoughts, are the food of unhappiness, sickness, and failure. When you supply this food in abundance these things come into your life – because they seek their food. Thoughts of God, thoughts of kindness, of optimism, and good will, are the food of health, joy, and success; and if you furnish a bountiful supply of this food you will attract these things instead.
Abundance | Cause | Events | Failure | Fear | God | Good | Health | Joy | Kindness | Life | Life | Optimism | Success | Thought | Unhappiness | Will |
Your contact with God lies in recognizing your identity, the “I am.” The “I am” is everything you arrogate to yourself in thought. If you say, “I am sick,” you have ordered your own. If you say, “I am well, I am one with God,” you have ordered your own. God is universal - “I am what I am” - and you as an individual particularize it when you say, “I am.” When you use your “I am” in an inverted or negative sense, you are using it against yourself and will bring sickness, poverty, controversy, and fear into your life. When you particularize, or individualize, Divine Power by using “I am” constructively, then you will get health, prosperity, and abounding happiness, for you will have identified yourself with God - the gold mine within.
Controversy | Fear | God | Gold | Health | Individual | Life | Life | Poverty | Power | Prosperity | Sense | Thought | Will | God |
The only way to get rid of your problem is to change your belief, or reverse the false process of thought. Fear is always present when there is in harmony, and an affirmation will not in itself destroy fear. You must refuse to be intimidated by the seeming danger, whatever it is, and put your reliance on the Love of God. Then fear will begin to go.
Belief | Change | Danger | Destroy | Fear | God | Harmony | Love | Present | Thought | Will |