This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.
Change | Consciousness | Dreams | Future | History | Individual | Memory | Myth | Past | Revenge | Science | Technology | Tradition | Will |
Harvey Cox, fully Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr.
Theology is unapologetically prescriptive. It does not claim to be value-free or neutral. Theologians draw upon the beliefs of a particular tradition to suggest a course of action, an appropriate response, a way of life commensurate with what the faith teaches. Theology can be wrong; it cannot be noncommittal.
Action | Faith | Life | Life | Theology | Tradition | Wrong |
James A. Pike, fully Bishop James Albert Pike
Tradition should be deabsolutized, but not scrapped. We’re in a two thousand year continuity, and that which expresses continuity is valuable. In a state of flux on doctrine, continuity of tradition has even more value.
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
Even if the Universe existed for man’s sake and man existed for the purpose of serving God, one must still ask: What is the end of serving God? He does not become more perfect if all His creatures serve Him. Nor would he lose anything if nothing existed beside Him. It might perhaps be replied that the service of God is not intended for God’s perfection, but for our own. Then, however, the question arises: What is the object of our being perfect? Pressing the inquiry as to the purpose of Creation, we must at last arrive at the answer: it was the will of God. Logic as well as tradition prove clearly that the Universe does not exist for man’s sake, but that all things in it exist each for its own sake.
God | Inquiry | Logic | Man | Nothing | Object | Perfection | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Service | Tradition | Universe | Will | God |
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Creed | Dogma | Future | Illusion | Life | Life | Mankind | Philosophy | Poetry | Race | Religion | Rest | Science | Time | Tradition | Will | World |
Whatever and however we may try to think, we think within the sphere of tradition. Tradition prevails when it frees us from thinking back to a thinking forward, which is no longer a planning. Only when we turn thoughtfully toward what has already been thought, will we be turned to use for what must still be thought.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Christian tradition has never upheld this right [to private property] as absolute and untouchable… The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, the fact that goods are meant for everyone.
Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid.
Aid | Hope | Learning | Men | Nothing | Poetry | Thought | Tradition | Virtue | Virtue | Wit |
We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition - "the tradition of the new." Yesterday's avant-garde experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliché.
Experiment | Novelty | Tomorrow | Tradition | Novelty |
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
When a man follows the way of the world, or the way of the flesh, or the way of tradition (i.e. when he believes in religious rites and the letter of the scriptures, as though they were intrinsically sacred) knowledge of Reality cannot arise in him.
Knowledge | Man | Reality | Rites | Sacred | Tradition | World |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.
Intelligence | Tradition | Worth |
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Awareness | Belief | Experience | Individual | Language | People | Reality | Sense | Tradition | Words | Awareness | Victim |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Free thought" means thinking freely... To be worthy of the name [freethinker] he must be free of two things: the force of tradition and the tyranny of his own passions. No one is completely free from either, and in the measure of a man's emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker.
Force | Man | Means | Thinking | Thought | Tradition | Tyranny |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
With his discovery of the discrepancy between thinking and being, Freud not only undermined the Western tradition of idealism in its philosophical and popular forms, he also made a far-reaching discovery in the field of ethics. Until Freud, sincerity could be defined as saying what one believed. Since Freud this is no longer a sufficient definition. The difference between what I say and what I believe assumes a new dimension, namely that of my unconscious belief or my unconscious striving...Since Freud, the sentence I meant well has lost its function as an excuse.
Belief | Discovery | Idealism | Sincerity | Thinking | Tradition | Discovery |
The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
History | Individual | Justice | Meaning | Reading | Tradition | Words |
Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.