This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Alain-Fournier, Pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier NULL
There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it's rather hard to tell which of us ought to reform the rest of us.
William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen
Every reform carries the seed of its own abuse.
Just because something is tradition doesn't make it right.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.
For tradition to be alive it has to be allowed to be a fountain of power for things undreamt of, things to come.
The problem is the spirit of our age: denial of transcendence, the vapidity of values, emptiness in the heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual.
William Kilpatrick, fully William Heard Kilpatrick
The core problem facing our schools is a moral one. All the other problems derive from it. Even academic reform depends on putting character first.
A hero… is not a hero until he is recognized as one. This means that the actualization of the hero is a two-way projection. First the hero must project by way of his deeds, his style, his character. When the projection registers, an imaginative process begins to remake the hero to fit as fully as possible the symbolic weight of his image. Legend and myth take over the historical personage, and through either an oral or a written tradition he is reborn in his heroic apotheosis.
Character | Deeds | Hero | Means | Myth | Style | Tradition |
Such negative terms as “Protestant” and “Reformation” are unhappy designations for a movement that in essence was not protest but affirmation, not reform but conservation, not reaction, but propulsion. Its best name is “evangelical.”
Conservation | Protest | Reform |
Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
We know tradition as a living social process constantly changing, constantly in need of criticism, but constant also as the continuing memory, value system and habit structure of a society.
Criticism | Habit | Memory | Need | Society | System | Tradition | Value |
Susan Cullen-Ward, born Susan Barbara Zogu, formerly Williams, née Susan Cullen-Ward
If a man has lived in a tradition which tells him that nothing can be done about his human condition, to believe that progress is possible may be the greatest revolution of all.
Man | Nothing | Progress | Revolution | Tradition |
A Hopi tradition speaks of a fall from grace in which human beings experience themselves as progressively more separate from earth, animals, and other humans. The return to grace is through reunion. The cause of the fall is ascribed to people's forgetting their true nature and purpose.
Cause | Earth | Experience | Grace | Nature | People | Purpose | Purpose | Tradition |
The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values. Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one.
Future | Myth | Order | Past | Present | Society | Tradition | Society |
In general the character tradition assumes that institutions such as families, schools, and long-lived organizations will act more wisely than individuals and also that individuals who have lived through a variety of experiences have learned things that many young people do not yet know.
The human race has had long experience and a find tradition in surviving adversity. But now we face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.
Adversity | Experience | Human race | Little | Prosperity | Race | Tradition |