Great Throughts Treasury

"Spiritual truth is truth in whatever age, but the tasks of its service change as society changes."

"Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict – alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence."

"They have not wanted peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war - as though the absence of war was the same as peace."

"The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness; aggressiveness engenders hostility; hostility engenders fear - a disastrous circle."

"Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live."

"Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow."

"People and societies who cannot see any purpose in their existence beyond the material and the tangible must live chartlessly, and must live in spiritual misery, because they cannot overcome the greatest fact and mystery of human life, next to birth, which is death."

"Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence."

"And only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live in every experience, painful or joyous; to live in gratitude for every moment, to live abundantly."

"Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism."

"A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph."

"Can one preach at home inequality of races and nations and advocate abroad good-will towards all men?"

"Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy."

"Disillusion comes only to the illusioned. One cannot be disillusioned of what one never put faith in."

"As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. My offense was to think that Hitler was just an ordinary man, after all."

"Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light."

"I know now that there are things for which I am prepared to die. I am willing to die for political freedom; for the right to give my loyalty to ideals above a nation and above a class; for the right to teach my child what I think to be the truth; for the right to explore such knowledge as my brains can penetrate; for the right to love where my mind and heart admire, without reference to some dictator's code to tell me what the national canons on the matter are; for the right to work with others of like mind; for a society that seems to me becoming to the dignity of the human race."

"Inventive man has invented nothing -- nothing from scratch. If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds."

"He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.... His movements are awkward. There is in his face no trace of any inner conflict or self-discipline."

"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered."

"It is quite hard at times to distinguish a genius from a lunatic."

"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"

"It is true that the techniques of war are constantly "improved" as the genius of an age of invention is put in the service of the war machine. But that is not what is most disturbing. What is revolutionary is that the minds of men, women and children are being deliberately trained, directed, distorted, by every conceivable instrument of education and propaganda, to make them tolerant of war, receptive of war, prepared for war, lovers of war. The greatest menace in the world is not poison gas. There are gas masks against that. The menace is poisoned words, poisoned ideas."

"Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare."

"Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism."

"People have confidence in women to get them out of trouble."

"The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld."

"There is nothing more demoralizing than sudden, overwhelming disillusionment."

"The kind of intelligence a genius has is a different sort of intelligence. The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where."

"The instinct to worship is hardly less strong than the instinct to eat."

"The prices are ridiculous... I don't see how people can go back and forth to work or to school. How can we afford the gas?"

"There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings."

"To have felt too much is to end in feeling nothing."

"What was once Sinclair Lewis is buried in no ground. Even in life he was fully alive only in his writing. He lives in public libraries from Maine to California, in worn copies in the bookshelves of women from small towns who, in their girlhood, imagined themselves as Carol Kennicotts, and of medical men who, as youths, were inspired by Martin Arrowsmith."

"When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered."

"Women have had the vote for over forty years and their organizations lobby in Washington for all sorts of causes; why, why, why don't they take up their own causes and obvious needs?"