Great Throughts Treasury

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

Related Quotes

Eugene Peterson

God does not want us neurotically dependent on him but willingly trustful in him. And so he weans us. The period of infancy will not be sentimentally extended beyond what is necessary.

Order |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

LAVINIA: He made me feel for the first time in my life that everything about love could be sweet and natural... I have a right to love!

Contempt | Fighting | Heart | Little | Pride | Afraid | Old | Think |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.

Heart |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

Heart | Kill | Love | Past | Reading | Time |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.

Change | Heart | Joy | Looks | People | Rest | Time |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.

Better | Man | Order | Prison | System |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.

Heart | People |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you - incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation.

Need | Omnipotence | Order |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart.

Experiment | Freedom | Law | Lesson | Order | Will | Work | Think |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

Age | Attention | Land | Order | Past |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

I do not oppose the insane asylum — but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.

Enough | Fortune | Man | Men | Nothing | Order | Work |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

Order | Society | Society | Govern |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

Battle | Criticism | Day | Life | Life | Literature | Nothing | Order | Present | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Justify | Order | War | Will |

Euripedes NULL

Let no one think of me that I am humble or weak or passive; let them understand I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies, loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.

Heart |

Eustace Budgell

But what has been often urged as a consideration of much more weight, is not only the opinion of the better sort, but the general consent of mankind to this great truth; which I think could not possibly have come to pass, but from one of the three following reasons: either that the idea of a God is innate and co-existent with the mind itself; or that this truth is so very obvious that it is discovered by the first exertion of reason in persons of the most ordinary capacities; or, lastly, that it has been delivered down to us through all ages by a tradition from the first man. The Atheists are equally confounded, to whichever of these three causes we assign it.

Better | Desire | Good | Impression | Order | Time | Will | Words |

Eustace Budgell

In short, a private education seems the most natural method for the forming of a virtuous man; a public education for making a man of business. The first would furnish out a good subject for PlatoÂ’s republic, the latter a member for a community overrun with artifice and corruption.

Education | Means | Men | Nothing | Order | Reason | Service | Temper | Think |