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

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Nature, it has been said, abhors a vacuum, and when the available "spiritual space" is not filled by some higher motivation, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower – by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalized in the economic calculus.

Growth | Man | Mystery | System |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.

Antithesis | Courage | Desire | Faith | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Soul | Thinking | World |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.

Ability | Man |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The marketÂ… represents only the surface of society and its significance relates to the momentary situation as it exists there and then. There is no probing into the depths of things, into the natural or social facts that lie behind them. In a sense, the market is the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.

Life | Life | Man | Neglect |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

We are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves.

Man |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Everybody knows that the butterfly emerges from the pupa, and the pupa from a quite different thing called a larva, and the larva from the butterfly's egg.

Man | Psychology | Sense | Soul |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.

Future | Man | Means | Science | Technology | Words |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

We should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time bases, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty and permanence.

Man | Plenty | Technology | Work |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

If our intellectual leaders treat work as nothing but a necessary evil soon to be abolished as far as the majority is concerned, the urge to minimize it right away is hardly a surprising reaction, and the problem of motivation becomes insoluble.

Envy | Greed | Inevitable | Man | Nothing | Power | Problems |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Now, one does not have to be a believer in total equality, whatever that may mean, to be able to see that the existence of inordinately rich people in any society today is a very great evil.

Man | Means | Peace | Question | Regard |

Ernest Shurtleff Holmes

To believe in a just law of cause and effect, carrying with it a punishment or a reward, is to believe in righteousness.

Man | Time | World |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

We are, I believe, at the moment in grave danger of missing the 'path to perfection'.

Ability | Consciousness | Ego | Knowledge | Man | Nothing |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The natural advantages of the cultivation of sugar in Cuba are obvious, but the predominant fact is that Cuba was developed as a sugar factory of the United States.

Life | Life | Man | Property | Worth |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The gulf between this thoughtful mind of civilized man and the thoughtless animal soul of the savage is enormous -- greater than the gulf that separates the latter from the soul of the dog.

Action | Choice | Doctrine | Inheritance | Man | Organic | Survival | Will |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Though the great differences in the mental life and the civilisation of the higher and lower races are generally known, they are, as a rule, under-valued, and so the value of life at the different levels is falsely estimated. It is civilisation, and the fuller development of the mind that makes civilisation possible, that raise mans so much above the other animals, even his nearest animal relatives, the mammals. But this is, as a rule, peculiar to the higher races, and is found only in a very imperfect form or not at all among the lower. These lower races (such as the Veddahs or Austrailan negroes) are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes or dogs) than to civilised Europeans; we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.

Doctrine | Experiment | Ignorance |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men — how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?

Man | Need | Order | Society | Society | Approval |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Yet it is an astonishing fact that the science of the evolution of man does not even yet form part of the scheme of general education. In fact, educated people even in our day are for the most part quite ignorant of the important truths and remarkable phenomena which anthropogeny teaches us.

Light | Man | Understand |

Ernst Toller

And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity.

Death | Man | Mourning |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

It is only when we can see the world as a ladder, and when we can see man's position on the ladder, that we can recognize a meaningful task for man's life on earth.

Little | Man | Rest | Terrorism |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Socialists should insist on using the nationalized industries not simply to out-capitalize the capitalists—an attempt in which they may or may not succeed—but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilization of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort.

Ability | Courage | Growth | Man |