Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

John Hay, fully John Milton Hay

American Statesman, Diplomat, Author, Journalist, Secretary of State and Assistant to Abraham Lincoln

"They [trees] hang on from a past no theory can recover. They will survive us. The air makes their music. Otherwise, they live in savage silence, though mites and nematodes and spiders teem at their roots, and though the energy with which they feed on the sun and are able to draw water sometimes hundred of feet up their trunks and into their twigs and branches calls for a deafening volume of sound."

"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists them."

"Who would succeed in the world should be wise in the use of his pronouns. Utter the You twenty times, where you once utter the I."