This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henri Nouwen, fully Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen
Being a Christian in American doesn’t require a great cost. You can be Christian and fully participate in the secular culture. I have a sense that, more and more, being a Christian in this country will require a choice. The Christian will have to be willing to make big sacrifices… Right now, in this culture, you can have your cake and eat it too. But that is an illusion. You cannot be a fat sprinter. If you want to spring to the Kingdom, you had better be lean.
Better | Choice | Cost | Culture | Illusion | Right | Sense | Will |
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
Human morality is composed of four interconnecting principles: a genetic predisposition toward survival, the neural development of the brain, a social imperative toward group cohesion, and a cognitive propensity to make distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil. Our moral continuum appears to be strongly influenced by the degrees of connectedness we feel with others; the more connected we feel, the more we act with generosity, compassion and fairness.
Compassion | Evil | Fairness | Generosity | Good | Morality | Principles | Right | Survival | Wrong |
John Naber, fully John Phillips Naber
It’s the tough decisions that really test our character, for character is revealed when the price of doing the right thing is more than we want to pay.
Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but it is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope, armed with fire and fagot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.
Conscience | Intolerance | Liberty | Right | Toleration |
Red Jacket, aka Sagoyewatha NULL
You say that you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great Spirit agreeably to His mind; and, if we do not take hold of the religion which you white people teach, we shall be unhappy hereafter. You say that you are right and we are lost. How do we know this to be true? We understand that your religion is written in a book. If it was intended for us, as well as you, whey has not the Great Spirit given to tus, and not only to us, but what did He not give to our forefathers the knowledge of that book, with the means of understanding it rightly? We only know what you tell us about it. How shall we know when to believe, being so often deceived by the white people? Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agreed, as you can all read the book?
Knowledge | Means | Mind | People | Religion | Right | Spirit | Teach | Understanding | Worship | Understand |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair “Will” Rogers
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Right |
Human happiness does not consist in satisfying one’s personal wishes but in the certainty of being needed, in having the visions of goals still unattained.
Have you ever considered how dreadful it would be if our lives had no appointed end but went on forever? Can you imagine that as far as the eye can see into the future we should remain enmeshed in all the desires and troubles of this life and that all the ensuing envy, hatred and malice, our own and other people’s should continue to pile up undiminished? If you have ever considered how intolerable the burden of our life would be without the understood certainty that it has an appointed end, you know that death comes to all, even the most fortunate, not as an enemy but as a deliverance.
Death | Enemy | Envy | Future | Life | Life | Malice | People | Troubles |
Samyutta Nikaya "Connected Discourses" or "Kindred Sayings" NULL
This is the Noble Eightfold Path: right views, right intention; right speech, right action, right livelihood; right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
Action | Effort | Intention | Mindfulness | Right | Speech |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
Future | Man | Peace | Peril | Right | Soul | Ugly | World |