This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We can flow along with the mainstream of a culture that does not serve us well – does not really make us comfortable, does not really make us safe; but only offers illusions of happiness, comfort, safety – or we can begin the oftentimes prickly work of searching our own hearts, of asking who and what we love, who and what we feel strongly enough about to change our lives for, to fight for, to live for.
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
The lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs of the coming era... Instead of worshipping supernatural rulers, it will sanctify the higher manifestations of human nature, in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, and will emphasize the fuller realization of life’s possibilities as a sacred trust.
Art | Era | Human nature | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Religion | Sacred | Trust | Will | Art |
Mother Jones, referring to Mary Harris Jones
Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Hell |
John Hick, fully John Harwood Hick
To see the world as being ruled by a divine love which sets infinite value upon each individual and includes all men in its scope, and yet to live as though the world were a realm of chance in which each must fight for his own interests against the rest, argues a very dim and wavering vision of God’s rule.
Chance | God | Individual | Love | Men | Rest | Rule | Vision | Wavering | World | Value |
The contribution of religion to the unity of all human beings is made, not in the intellectual but in the spiritual realm.
John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman
True religion is slow in growth, and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgment; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself: it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers.
We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate, that is to insure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge… Nothing becomes truly “one’s own” except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice… The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but the gift of knowledge makes them free.
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 |
God will have no man pressed with another’s inconveniences in matters spiritual and intellectual – no man’s salvati8on to depend on another; and every tooth that eats sour grapes shall be set on edge for itself, and for none else.
Achmad Sukarno, born Kusno Sosrodihardjo
Let us remember that no blessing of God is so sweet as life and liberty. Let us remember that the stature of all mankind is diminished so long as nations or parts of nations are still unfree. Let us remember that the highest purpose of man is the liberation of man from his bonds of fear, his bonds of human degradation, his bonds of poverty – the liberation of man from the physical, spiritual, and intellectual bonds which for too long stunted the development of mankind’s majority.
Fear | God | Liberty | Life | Life | Majority | Man | Mankind | Nations | Poverty | Purpose | Purpose | God |
A vision is to be esteemed the more noble the more intellectual it is, the more it is stripped of all image and approaches the state of pure contemplation.
Contemplation | Vision |
Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.