This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What has been the effect of coercion [sic]? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and errors all over the earth... [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
Government | Liberty | Man | Rights | Government |
The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management.
Government | Liberty | Power | Present | Revolution | Government |
We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.
We were laboring under a dropsical fullness of circulating medium. Nearly all of it is now called in by the banks, who have the regulation of the safety-valves of our fortunes, and who condense and explode them at their will. Lands in this State cannot now be sold for a year’s rent; and unless our Legislature have wisdom enough to effect a remedy by a gradual diminution only of the medium, there will be a general revolution of property in this state.
Authority | Battle | Duty | Liberty | Mankind | Nations | Right | War | Friends |
Unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power in the individuals and their families selected for the trust. Whether our Constitution has hit on the exact degree of control necessary, is yet under experiment.
Whatever be the Constitution, great care must be taken to provide a mode of amendment when experience or change of circumstances shall have manifested that any part of it is unadapted to the good of the nation.
The true barriers of our liberty are our State governments; and the wisest conservative power ever contrived by man, is that of which our Revolution and present government found us possessed.
We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
Choice | Government | Labor | Liberty | Will | Government |
We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles. The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; . . .
The dread of being open to the ideas of others generally comes from our hidden insecurity about our own convictions. We fear that we may be converted – or perverted – by a pernicious doctrine. On the other hand, if we are mature and objective in our open-mindedness, we may find that viewing things from a basically different perspective – that of our adversary – we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideal more realistically.
Church | Contradiction | Doctrine | Glory | God | Liberty | Light | Love | Man | Nature | Order | Purpose | Purpose | Quiet | Reality | Soul | Spirit | Surrender | Theology | Vision | Will | God |
A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.
This whole attitude of abstraction, of hatred and denigration of the body, has finally led to a pathological and totally unrealistic obsession with bodily detail … [in consequence of which] love becomes no longer an expression of the communion between persons… Instead of saying that an act is pure when you remove all that is material, sensuous, fleshly, emotional, passionate, etc., from it, we will on the contrary say that a sexual act is pure when it gives a rightful place to the body, the senses, the emotions …, the special needs of the person, all that is called for by the unique relationship between the two lovers, and that is demanded by the situation in which they find themselves… It is precisely in this spirit of celebration, gratitude, and joy that true purity is found.
Freedom | Glory | God | Heart | Illusion | Liberty | Love | Means | Men | Mind | Order | Receive | Silence | God |
For my own part, my belief in the perfection of the Deity will not permit me to believe that a book so manifestly obscure, disorderly, and contradictory can be His work
Liberty | Spirit | Friendship |
I do not believe in the creed professed by any church that I know of. Each of these churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my part, I disbelieve them all.
Liberty |
But such is the nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing irresistible.
For what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I.
Liberty |