This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence.
Association | Gold | Law | Men | Riches | Wealth | Will | World | Riches | Association |
Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
Freedom and responsibility go together, as do independence and discipline.
Discipline | Freedom | Responsibility |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
In duty the individual finds his liberation; liberation from independence on mere natural impulse.
Duty | Impulse | Individual |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the reunification of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, that is, ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent persona and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type.
Consciousness | Contradiction | Isolation | Knowing | Law | Life | Life | Love | Means | Nothing | Self | Understanding | Unity |
Freedom and the consciousness of it as a faculty of following the moral law with unyielding resolution is independence of inclinations, at least as motives determining (though not as affecting) our desire, and so far as I am conscious of this freedom in following my moral maxims, it is the only source of an unaltered contentment which is necessarily connected with it and rests on no special feeling.
Consciousness | Contentment | Desire | Freedom | Law | Maxims | Moral law | Motives | Resolution | Following |
If Thomas Jefferson were in Washington yesterday walking down the street, he would have been arrested. He was too young, and he had long hair! And if Jefferson had been carrying the Declaration of Independence with him yesterday, he would have been indicted for conspiring to overthrow the government, along with his co-conspirators George Washington and John Adams and Tom Paine and a lot of others.
Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease, and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving old as a servant finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence.
Association | Law | Men | Riches | Wealth | Will | World | Riches | Association | Old |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties… They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak
Courage | Freedom | Liberty | Means | Men | Will | Happiness | Think |
The great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Better | Distinction | Duty | Greatness | Man | Meanness | Opinion | People | Rule | Solitude | Will | World | Think |
It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. I knew a man of simple habits and earnest character who never put out his hands nor opened his lips to court the public, and having survived several rotten reputations of younger men, honor came at last and sat down with him upon his private bench from which he had never stirred.
Character | Honor | Man | Men | Opinion | Public | Self | Solitude | World |
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
The Declaration of Independence . . . is much more than a political document. It constitutes a spiritual manifesto—revelation, if you will—declaring not for this nation only, but for all nations, the source of man's rights. Nephi, a Book of Mormon prophet, foresaw over 2,300 years ago that this event would transpire. The colonies he saw would break with Great Britain and that 'the power of the Lord was with [the colonists],' that they 'were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations' (1 Nephi 13:16, 19). "The Declaration of Independence was to set forth the moral justification of a rebellion against a long-recognized political tradition—the divine right of kings. At issue was the fundamental question of whether men's rights were God-given or whether these rights were to be dispensed by governments to their subjects. This document proclaimed that all men have certain inalienable rights. In other words, these rights came from God.
God | Justification | Lord | Men | Power | Question | Rebellion | Right | Rights | God |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it. That he is in it is obvious, but why is he outside it? First, because he is not brainwashed by the ruling ideology, that is to say, he has an extraordinary kind of independence of thought and feeling; hence he can have a greater objectivity than the average person has. There are many emotional factors too. And certainly I do not mean to enter here into the complex problem of the revolutionary thinker. But it seems to me essential that in a certain sense he transcends his society. You may say he transcends it because of the new historical developments and possibilities he is aware of, while the majority still think in traditional terms.
Majority | Objectivity | Sense | Society | Thought | Time | Society | Think | Thought |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the full development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.
There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character.
Little |