Great Throughts Treasury

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

Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade

British Historian, Explorer, Author and Philosopher

"A people can never rise from low estate as long as the engrossed in the painful struggle for daily bread. On the other hand leisure alone is not sufficient to effect the self-promotion of man."

"All men cannot be poets or philanthropists; but all men can join in that gigantic and god-like work the progress of creation. Whoever improves their own nature improves the universe of which they are a part."

"The history of morals is the extension of the reciprocal or selfish virtues from the clan to the tribe, from the tribe to the nation, from the nation to all communities living under the same government, civil or religious, then people of the same colour, and finally to all mankind."

"A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile."

"A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality."

"And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds."

"Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness."

"As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity."

"As for the system of the Commune, which makes it impossible for a man to rise or fall, it is merely the old caste system revived; if it could be put into force, all industry would be disheartened, emulation would cease, and mankind would go to sleep."

"All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilized men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilized men believe that they believe."

"As the saints and prophets were often forced to practice long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. ? To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall."

"If indeed there were a judgment-day, it would be for man to appear at the bar not as a criminal but as accuser."

"Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all."

"If Christianity were true religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant."

"Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt."

"Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes."

"In Europe itself it is not probable that war will ever absolutely cease until science discovers some destroying force so simple in its administration, so horrible in its effects, that all art, all gallantry, will be at an end, and battles will be massacres which the feelings of mankind will be unable to endure."

"It made me what I am."

"If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed."

"It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm."

"It is a sure criterion of the civilization of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all."

"Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation."

"Sickly school of politicians who declare that all countries belong to their inhabitants and that to take them is a crime."

"Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals."

"Tamed and broken in . . . set free, and became beautiful, long-haired, low-voiced, sweet-eyed creatures, delicate in form, modest in demeanor and refined in soul."

"The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal."

"The one, the outstanding, dramatic, imaginative, historical picture of life, to be inspired by Victorian science."

"The first rational exposition of the relations of mankind to the mystery which shrouds the how and wherefore of man?s existence."

"The mind of an ordinary man is in so imperfect a condition that it requires a creed."

"The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness."

"There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes."

"The period . . . which begins with the animal globules preying on the plant globules in the primeval sea and ends with the conquest by the carnivorous shepherds of the vegetable eaters in the river plains."

"The Supreme Power is not a Mind, but something higher than a Mind, . . . not a Being, but something higher than a Being, something for which we have no words, something for which we have no ideas."

"What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?"

"The unity of the universe is a scientific fact. To assert that it is the operation of a single Mind is a conjecture based on analogy, and analogy may be a deceptive guide."

"We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act."

"While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but the percentages remain constant."