Great Throughts Treasury

"If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The truth about Kolchak (and his double, Denikin) has now been revealed in full. The shooting of tens of thousands of workers. The shooting even of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The flogging of peasants of entire districts. The public flogging of women. The absolutely unbridled power of the officers, the sons of landowners. Endless looting. Such is the truth about Kolchak and Denikin." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"We shall not bind ourselves by treaties. We shall not allow ourselves to be entangled by treaties. We reject all clauses on plunder and violence, but we shall welcome all clauses containing provisions for good-neighborly relations and all economic agreements; we cannot reject these." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Constant happiness is the philosopher's stone of the soul." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere." - Victor Hugo

"The child learns to worship money and the things which money can buy; he admires cruelty and cunning, rather than Sympathy and Love. So, the Home, the School and the Society have to rise and take up this challenge posed to the future of this great land." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The Principle of Appearance that deludes as multiple manifestation is Maya. It is not external to God; it is inherent in God, just as all Powers are inherent in Him." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Reason and freedom are incompatible with weakness." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action... So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives. For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy's onset." - Thucydides NULL

"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it." - Thucydides NULL

"Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries." - Thucydides NULL

"Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arm's length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"The most ordinary faces of men, and women – my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common: None was started by one person." - Ernesto Sirolli

"From our position of being reasonably well off and comfortable, [perhaps] university professors, we tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, ‘Why don’t they take more responsibility for their lives?’ And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care for you. And the poorer you are the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life… My lesson is to stop berating people for not being responsible and start to think of ways instead of providing the poor with the luxury that we all have, which is that a lot of decisions are taken for us. If we do nothing, we are on the right track. For most of the poor, if they do nothing, they are on the wrong track." - Esther Duflo

"I read one psychologist's theory that said, "Never strike a child in your anger." When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he's recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?" - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it." - Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

"I begin to feel an enormous need to become savage and to create a new world." -

"I hate it in friends when they come too late to help." - Euripedes NULL

"ManÂ… need not stand alone. Prayer will open doors; prayer will remove barriers; prayer will ease pressures; prayer will give inner peace and comfort during times of strain and stress and difficulty." - Ezra Taft Benson

"It has been said that the modern world is divided between the hot and hasty pursuit of affairs in the hours of labor, and the no less eager chase of pleasure in the hours of leisure. But even our pleasures are calculated and business like. We measure our enjoyments by the sum expended. Our salons are often little better than bazaars of fashion." - Felix Adler

"Theories of what is true have their day. They come and go, leave their deposit in the common stock of knowledge, and are supplanted by other more convincing theories. The thinkers and investigators of the world are pledged to no special theory, but feel themselves free to search for the greater truth beyond the utmost limits of present knowledge. So likewise in the field of moral truth, it is our hope, that men in proportion as they grow more enlightened, will learn to hold their theories and their creeds more loosely, and will none the less, nay, rather all the more be devoted to the supreme end of practical righteousness to which all theories and creeds must be kept subservient. There are two purposes then which we have in view: To secure in the moral and religious life perfect intellectual liberty, and at the same time to secure concert in action. There shall be no shackles upon the mind, no fetters imposed in early youth which the growing man or woman may feel prevented from shaking off, no barrier set up which daring thought may not transcend. And on the other hand there shall be unity of effort, the unity that comes of an end supremely prized and loved, the unity of earnest, morally aspiring persons, engaged in the conflict with moral evil." - Felix Adler

"There is a difficulty in the way of teaching the higher life, due to the fact that only those who have begun to lead it can understand the meaning of it. Nevertheless, all men can be induced to begin to lead it. Though they seem blind, their eyes can be opened so as to see. Deep down in every human heart is the seed of a diviner life, which only needs the quickening influence of right conditions to germinate." - Felix Adler

"And so it was settled. Sam Gamgee married Rose Cotton in the spring of 1420 (which was also famous for its weddings), and they came and lived at Bag End. And if Sam thought himself lucky, Frodo knew that he was more lucky himself; for there was not a hobbit in the Shire that was looked after with such care. When the labors or repair had all been planned and set going he took to a quiet life, writing a good deal and going through all his notes. He resigned the office of Deputy Mayor at the Free Fair that Midsummer, and dear old Will Whitfoot had another seven years of presiding at Banquets." -

"Being a cheerful hobbit, he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed." -