Great Throughts Treasury

"The secret of negotiation is to harmonize the real interests of the parties concerned." - François de Callières, sieur de Rochelay et de Gigny

"It’s a well-known proposition that you know who’s going to win a negotiation: it’s he who pauses the longest." - Robert Holmes à Court, fully Michael Robert Hamilton Holmes à Court

"There are good, God-fearing persons who still fall into certain faults, and it is better to bear with them than to be hard on them." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"I want to tell you, Socialists, that I have studied your philosophy; read your works upon economics, and not the meanest of them; studied your standard works, both in English and German -- have not only read, but studied them. I have heard your orators and watched the work of your movement the world over. I have kept close watch upon your doctrines for thirty years; have been closely associated with many of you, and know how you think and what you propose. I know, too, what you have up your sleeve. And I want to say that I am entirely at variance with your philosophy. I declare to you, I am not only at variance with your doctrines, but with your philosophy. Economically you are unsound; socially, you are wrong; industrially, you are an impossibility." - Samuel Gompers

"To think that we can have a viable human economy by destroying the earth economy is absurd." - Thomas Berry

"Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere. There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, 'mine' is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as 'ours.' This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction." - Wendell Berry

"Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy." - Wendell Berry

"Slayer of the Winter, art thou here again? O welcome, thou that bring'st the Summer nigh! The bitter wind makes not thy victory vain, nor will we mock thee for thy faint blue sky." - William Morris