This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We have lose the habit of thinking quietly, of trying to know ourselves and our friends, and the world around us, and the God who is above and within us. We are looking in the wrong places for happiness. We are so exclusively occupied with material things and with their accumulation that the higher values are crowded out.
Prize not thyself by what thou hast, but by what thou art; he that values a jewel by its golden frame, or a book by its silver clasps, or a man by his vast estate, errs.
Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
It required the Great Depression to open the eyes of the American people to the economic, cultural, social, political, and spiritual values inherent in a great democracy. For this I am thankful. As a distinctly finite being, man learns only through tragic experiences. Progress and Pain are Siamese twins.
Democracy | Depression | Man | Pain | People | Progress | Wisdom |
Peter A. Bertocci, fully Peter Anthony Bertocci
In all real prayer there are two persons interacting with each other: God and the finite mind. The individual is meeting the conditions for finding God, and God is finding the opportunity to enter into a kind of relationship with the individual otherwise not possible. For in prayer at its best both God and man meet, both to foster the creation of new values in and through each other and to enjoy mutual fellowship for its own sake.
God | Individual | Man | Mind | Opportunity | Prayer | Relationship | God |
Risk taking only makes sense when you have a core set of values that do not change.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
In order to live we must decide on one course of action rather than another, moment by moment. We declare our values and take our stands in both small ways and large. Were we to admit that we are never certain that we have chosen correctly, and never reassured that this chosen course was the correct course of action, then we would be open to the unending exploration and revision in our way of living. We would have learned to put our prejudices and assumptions, our convictions and beliefs at risk.
Action | Convictions | Order | Risk |
The ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological, nothing definable in terms of how it happens, but something ethical, definable only in terms of what is attained.
Nothing |
The essence of the Jewish concept of life seems to me to be the affirmation of life for all creatures. For the life of the individual has meaning only in the service of enhancing and ennobling the life of every living thing. Life is holy; i.e., it is the highest worth on which all other values depend.
Peace of mind is the greatest asset we can have for happy, healthy living. This is an inner victory which only comes from knowing God intimately. Then the material things of life do not both us any longer - we live in a spiritual world, and spiritual values are the only real values in life.
God | Happy | Knowing | Life | Life | Mind | Peace | World | God |
Modern secularity has offered another way of dealing with religious pluralism. As religious traditions lose their importance as means of self-understanding and community identification, their differences and mutual exclusiveness diminish in importance. Alienation from any particular religious faith tends to move the question of religious particularity into the realm of indifference, as life is determined by nonreligious values and institutions. Yet secularity has been no more successful in establishing human community than has the religious vision. The competing claims of nationalism, economic imperialism, and ideological triumphalism are also demonic forms of particularity that have not been able to establish a new universality in human community.
Alienation | Faith | Imperialism | Indifference | Life | Life | Means | Question | Self | Understanding | Vision |
The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.
Civilization | Faith | Grace | Mankind | Race | Receive | Responsibility |
I believe that our choice between two models of psychiatry is really a choice between two competing sets of moral values that will ultimately determine the kind of society we live in. One is the Psychotherapeutic Model’s ideal of healing the soul with its values of self-awareness, autonomy, personal growth, an I-Thou spirit of love, respect, and compassion for others, and an acceptance of moral responsibility for our own egoistic impulses and emotions. The other is the Medical Model’s ideal of quick fix, with its swimming-pool values of stability and conformity, and an I-It orientation toward material success and other superficial addictive pleasures
Acceptance | Awareness | Choice | Compassion | Conformity | Emotions | Growth | Love | Model | Respect | Responsibility | Self | Self-awareness | Society | Soul | Spirit | Success | Will | Society |
D. W. Harding, fully Denys Clement Wyatt Harding
A necessary quality for the attainment of individuality is the ability to tolerate some degree of loneliness in the sense of independent adherence to values that those around you will not support.
Ability | Attainment | Individuality | Loneliness | Sense | Will |
Spiritual values have meaning only in human relations and are as much a part of the evolutionary process as the physical structure of man.
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 |