This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ideas or hypotheses are tested by the consequences which they produce when they are acted upon.
Consequences | Ideas |
Angus Dun and Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The occasions to which the concept of the just war can be rightly applied have become highly restricted. A war to “defend the victims of wanton aggression” where the demands of justice join the demands of order, is today the clearer case of a just war… The concept of a just war does not provide moral justification for initiating a war of incalculable consequences to end such oppression.
Aggression | Consequences | Justice | Justification | Oppression | Order | War |
Loneliness is a game of pretense, for the essential loneliness is an escape from an inescapable God.
God | Loneliness |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In our effort to escape from aloneness and powerlessness, we are ready to get rid of our individual self either by submission to new forms of authority or by a compulsive conforming to accepted patterns.
Authority | Effort | Individual | Self | Submission |
There’s a moment when the choice to act moves beyond a discussion of motives, for even an awareness of our own motives can become a form of necessity that lets our responsibility off the hook. And the moment of faith is a moment when no part of us is excused. With no ifs, no buts, no conditions, no escape clauses, all we are is challenged to rise to the choice and shoulder the responsibility for our answer.
Awareness | Choice | Discussion | Faith | Motives | Necessity | Responsibility | Awareness |
F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to beat the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.
Awareness | Conscience | Consequences | Decision | Duty | Necessity | Responsibility | Awareness |
Our pursuit of knowledge involves exploring the consequences of our initial assumptions, both our conceptual assumptions and empirical ones
Zealotry is often, it seems to me - a fundamentalism is just one form of it - an escape from anxiety. If you’re really scared, then the simple answer is going to be better than the complicated answer.
Those who labor on the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.
Earth | Focus | God | Labor | People | Sacred | Virtue | Virtue |
We cannot escape fear. We can only transform it into a companion that accompanies us on all our exciting adventures.
Fear |
John E. Large, fully John Ellis Large
Not many men may be willing to die for love these days. But you can’t escape the fact that millions are dying daily for the very lack of it.
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
Robert M. Linder, fully Robert Mitchell Linder
Only by being permitted to experience the consequences of his actions will the child acquire a sense of responsibility; and within the limits marked by the demands of his safety this must be done. From such training we can expect many benefits to the person, one of which will certainly be the development of a natural rather than an imposed control over [himself].
Consequences | Control | Experience | Responsibility | Sense | Training | Will | Child |
The age of isolation is gone. And gone are the days in which barbed wire served as demarcation lines, separating and isolating countries from one another. No country can escape looking beyond its boundaries to find the source of the currents which influence how it can live with others.
Stories have to have an equivalent “moral physics,” which indicates what consequences attach to actions, who is rewarded, who is punished, how fair the world is.
Consequences | World |
Everything holds the great secret. For it is the inescapable situation of all being to be involved in the infinite mystery. We may continue to disregard the mystery, but we can neither deny nor escape it. The world is something we apprehend but cannot comprehend.