This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Of all ennobling sentiments, patriotism may be the most easily manipulated. On the one hand, it gives powerful expression to what is best in a nation’s character: a commitment to principle, a willingness to sacrifice, a devotion to the community by the choice of the individual. But among its toxic fruits are intolerance, belligerence and blind obedience, perhaps because it blooms most luxuriantly during times of war.
Character | Choice | Commitment | Devotion | Individual | Intolerance | Obedience | Patriotism | Sacrifice | War |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
Character | Commitment | Oppression |
Reading and what it can contribute to one's life is not something that pertains only to the ego and its conscious mind; it is also deeply rooted in the unconsciousness. Those who retain all through life a deep commitment to the literary harbor in their consciousness some residue of their earlier conviction that reading is an art permitting access to magic worlds, although very few of them are aware that they subconsciously believe this to be so.
Art | Commitment | Consciousness | Ego | Life | Life | Magic | Mind | Reading | Unconsciousness | Wisdom | Art |
Superstition renders a man a fool, and skepticism makes him mad.
Man | Skepticism | Superstition | Wisdom |
The great trouble with the skepticism of the age is, that it is not thorough enough. It questions everything but its own foundations.
Age | Enough | Skepticism | Wisdom | Trouble |
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, pen name Amanda Cross
Marriage today must... be concerned not with the inviolable commitment of constancy and unending passion, but with the changing patterns of liberty and discovery.
Commitment | Constancy | Discovery | Liberty | Marriage | Passion | Wisdom |
We are each a cell in the common body. When we choose to create, to activate the Godness within us, our movements affect and influence the whole. But until we really know this at a cellular level, our commitment to our own awakening remains an act of faith.
Awakening | Body | Commitment | Faith | Influence | Wisdom |
D. Z. Phillips, fully Dewi Zephaniah Phillips
Clearly a man’s commitment to God shows itself in the language he uses, not only about God, but about the world and his general behavior.
Behavior | Commitment | God | Language | Man | Wisdom | World | God |
By the spirit of the age... the man of today is forced into skepticism about his own thinking, in order to make him receptive to truth which comes to him from authority... Truth taken over by skepticism which has become believing... is not capable of uniting itself with him to the very marrow of his being.
Age | Authority | Man | Order | Skepticism | Spirit | Thinking | Truth | Wisdom |
The first things to be disputed by our commitment to nonviolence will be not the system but our own lives.
Commitment | System | Will |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.
Life without commitment is not worth living.
Commitment | Life | Life | Worth |
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
Faith | History | Skepticism |
I believe that, for the rest of the world, contemporary America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the best and the worst of our civilization. On the one hand, there are its profound commitment to enhancing civil liberty and to maintaining the strength of its democratic institutions, and the fantastic developments in science and technology which have contributed so much to our well-being; on the other, there is the blind worship of perpetual economic growth and consumption, regardless of their destructive impact on the environment, or how subject they are to the dictates of materialism and consumerism, or how they, through the omnipresence of television and advertising, promote uniformity, and banality instead of a respect for human uniqueness.
Advertising | Civilization | Commitment | Growth | Liberty | Materialism | Omnipresence | Respect | Rest | Science | Strength | Technology | Television | Uniformity | World | Worship | Respect |
There is not even one single thing we value when we restrict the question to ethical values. Instead, there is a plurality of different things we value, but in ethics and in life in general. In life we value pleasure, human interaction, achievement and contact with reality. In ethics we value human flourishing but also commitment and justice per se… No single set of rules seems adequate to the irreducible plurality of incommensurable things that we value.
Achievement | Commitment | Ethics | Justice | Life | Life | Pleasure | Question | Reality | Value |