This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Character | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Rights | Sacred | Truths |
The contradiction between what is requested of man and what can be offered to him has become so striking, the ideology so thin, the discontents in civilization so great that they must be compensated through annihilation of those who do not conform, political enemies, Jews, asocial persons, the insane. The new order of fascism is reason revealing itself as unreason.
Character | Civilization | Contradiction | Man | Order | Reason |
The spirit of the people must frequently be roused, in order to curb the ambition of the court; and the dread of rousing this spirit must be employed to prevent that ambition. Nothing so effectual to this purpose as the liberty of the press; by which all the learning, wit, and genius of the nation, may be employed on the side of freedom, and every one be animated to its defense.
Ambition | Character | Defense | Dread | Freedom | Genius | Learning | Liberty | Nothing | Order | People | Purpose | Purpose | Spirit | Wit | Ambition |
Our belief in truth itself.. that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives.
Belief | Better | Character | Desire | Position | System | Thinking | Truth |
Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.
Character | Freedom | Intelligence | Love |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war, we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint.
Age | Character | Obligation | Peace | Restraint | Strength | War |
Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.
Chance | Character | Conscience | Freedom | Good | Health | Life | Life | Occupation | Happiness |
Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all... of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.
Age | Character | Faith | Inquiry | Morality | Mystical | Science | Superstition | Truth |
Happiness is not pleasure, it is order. With order come freedom, and with freedom there is responsibility.
Character | Freedom | Order | Pleasure | Responsibility |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
This spectacle of old age would be unendurable if we did not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death is a birth. The scales of the whole hang balanced.
Age | Birth | Change | Character | Death | Old age | Time | Wisdom | Old |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
What is important is to free ourselves from ideas, from nationalism, from all religious beliefs and dogmas, so that we can act, not according to a pattern or an ideology, but as needs demand... It is only when the mind is free of idea and belief that it can act rightly... and freedom from ideas can take place only through self-awareness and self-knowledge.
Awareness | Belief | Character | Freedom | Ideas | Important | Knowledge | Mind | Self | Self-awareness | Self-knowledge | Wisdom |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Personality is the supreme realization of the innate individuality of a particular living being. Personality is an act of the greatest courage in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, and the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom of personal decision.
Absolute | Character | Courage | Decision | Existence | Freedom | Individual | Individuality | Life | Life | Personality |
Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man.
Age | Character | Contempt | Individual | Indulgence | Man | Pleasure | Sensuality |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
Character | Conformity | Enemy | Freedom | Growth |
Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.
Beauty | Character | Degeneracy | Destiny | Evil | Freedom | Good | Man | Ugly | Beauty |
Otto Kahn, fully Otto Hermann Kahn
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are... The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
Character | Cost | Freedom | Present | Submission | Surrender |