This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
There is no inherent authority of `truth’ to any concept except for the subjective value ascribed to it. Credibility is a subjective decision and purely experiential and indefinable. What is convincing to one person may be dismissed as nonsense by another. The realization and knowingness of God is radically and purely subjective. There is not even the hypothetical possibility that reason could arrive at Truth. Truth is knowable only by virtue of the identity of being it.
Authority | Decision | God | Nonsense | Reason | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | God | Value |
Religion declined not because it was refuted but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless.
Authority | Compassion | Creed | Discipline | Faith | Habit | Love | Past | Religion | Worship | Crisis |
Its effects on the soul is to be measured neither by the guilt nor by the temporal punishment inexorably fixed, but by that deep sense of loneliness it brings with it.
Guilt | Loneliness | Punishment | Sense | Soul |
Bertrand de Jouvenel, fully Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins
Ever increase of state authority must involve an immediate diminution of the liberty of each citizen.
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
One ought to both be feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting… Love is held by a chain of obligation, which men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Dread | Fear | Love | Men | Obligation | Punishment | Purpose | Purpose |
Robert M. Linder, fully Robert Mitchell Linder
Supported by the authority of all institutions, parenthood has come to amount to little more than a campaign against individuality. Every father and every mother trembles lest an offspring, in act or thought, should be different from his fellows; and the smallest display of uniqueness in a child becomes the signal for the application of drastic measures aimed at stamping out that small fire of noncompliance by which personal distinctness is expressed. In an atmosphere of anxiety, in a climate of apprehension, the parental conspiracy against children is planned.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Authority | Children | Conspiracy | Display | Father | Individuality | Little | Mother | Thought | Child |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
A prince… who wishes to guard against conspiracies should fear those on whom he has heaped benefits quite as much, and even more, than those whom he has wronged; for the latter lack the convenient opportunities which the former have in abundance. The intention of both is the same for the thirst of dominion is as great as that of revenge, and even greater. A prince, therefore, should never bestow so much authority upon his friends but that there should always be a certain distance between them and himself, and that there should always be something left for them to desire.
Abundance | Authority | Desire | Fear | Intention | Revenge | Wishes | Friends |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.
Authority | Belief | Conscience | God | Heart | Man | Men | God |
Rolling Thunder, born Louis Belmont Newell NULL
The idea is to have contempt for crime, not for people… It’s more useful to think of every other person as another you - to think of every individual as a representative of the universe.
It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
Authority | Blame | Compassion | Creed | Discipline | Faith | Habit | Love | Past | Philosophy | Religion | Science | Society | Worship | Crisis |
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
It is not God that is worshipped but the group or the authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority and not violation of integrity.
Jules Renard, aka Pierre-Jules Renard
Failure is not our only punishment for laziness: there is also the success of others.
Failure | Laziness | Punishment | Success |
Like every good teacher, authority should labor to render itself useless.
There is an inevitable tension between mysticism and religious orthodoxy… For the mystic, whatever his professed creed, final authority lies in his own experience.
Authority | Creed | Experience | Inevitable | Mysticism |
And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.
Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |