This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Adulthood offered two basic choices: either to help life in its wildness and unfolding, or to resist life by choosing security and routine.
Freedom is not an ideal it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set - and this in a world where half our fellow man have less than enough to eat.
Dreams | Enough | Freedom | Man | Means | Nothing | Television | World |
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Defense | Government | Property | Reality | Security |
If our freedom means ease alone, if it means shirking the hard disciplines of learning, if it means evading the rigors and rewards of creative activity, if it means more expenditure on advertising than education, if it means in the schools the steady cult of the trivial and the mediocre, if it means - worst of all - indifference, or even contempt for all but athletic excellence, we may keep for a time the forms of free society, but its spirit will be dead.
Advertising | Contempt | Cult | Education | Excellence | Freedom | Indifference | Learning | Means | Society | Spirit | Time | Will |
It is only when we hold people and things lightly that we can enjoy them fully. Life is a constant flow of coming and going. Things and people come into our lives and they leave, just as sure as they came... Our key to happiness is to enjoy a relationship while it lasts, allowing the person and the relationship complete freedom to evolve in the highest way for them... Let go and let God.
Freedom | God | Life | Life | People | Relationship | Happiness |
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
Art | Circumstances | Contempt | Freedom | Life | Life | Man | Responsibility | Work | World | Art |