This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Freethinkers are those who reach judgment based on critical thinking and independent reasoning without regard to prevailing authority and tradition.
Authority | Critical thinking | Judgment | Regard | Thinking | Tradition | Critical Thinking |
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.
This sharpening of skills is the real value of competition. Many have lost sight of the purpose of healthy competition, which helps us to draw forth inner strength and encourages us to transcend our ideas of personal limitation. The real competition, however, is within the person, and not between people... In essence, competition is cooperation.
Competition | Cooperation | Ideas | People | Purpose | Purpose | Strength | Value |
Happiness... must be some form of contemplation. But, being a man, one will also need external prosperity; for our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of contemplation, but our body also must be healthy and must have food and other attention. Still, we must not think that the man who is to be happy will need many things or great things... for self-sufficiency and action do not involve excess, and we do noble acts without ruling earth and sea.
Action | Attention | Body | Contemplation | Earth | Excess | Happy | Man | Nature | Need | Prosperity | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Self-sufficiency | Will | Think |
All married couples should learn the art of battle as the should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest - never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
The individual freedoms destroyed by the increase in national authority have been in the main the freedom to deny black Americans their elementary rights as citizens, the freedom to work little children in mills... the freedom to pay starvation wages... the freedom to... pollute the environment - all freedoms that, one supposes, a civilized country can readily do without
Authority | Children | Freedom | Individual | Little | Rights | Work |
The authority of reason is far more imperious than that of a master; for he who disobeys the one is unhappy, but he who disobeys the other is a fool.
A healthy body is a guest-chamber for the soul; a sick body is a prison.
Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.
Nothing destroyeth authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power pressed too far, and relaxed too much.