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

Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL

Ours will be the task of defining and explaining the notions of the most important truths… as well as that of leading back to the rule and straight path of honesty both in public and in private life, in the social and political spheres, all men and, indeed, each and every one of them, those who must obey as well as those whose duty is to command, for they are all sons of the same Father Who is in Heaven. We are also quite conscious of the fact that some will be shocked in hearing Us mention that We will, through necessity, concern Ourselves with politics. But anyone seeking to judge fairly will be quick to understand that the Sovereign Pontiff, who has been invested with the Supreme Magisterium, has no right whatsoever of divorcing questions relating to politics from the field of Faith and Morals. Moreover, in his capacity as chief and sovereign guide of that perfect society which is the Catholic Church, a society made up of men and also set up amongst men, he can only wish to foster and entertain close relationships with [all] heads of countries and members of governments if he wishes to see all the countries of the world protect their Catholic citizens' liberty and security.

Capacity | Duty | Faith | Father | Honesty | Important | Liberty | Men | Politics | Public | Right | Rule | Society | Will | Wishes | World | Society | Understand |

Alice Miller, née Rostovski

The following points are intended to amplify my meaning: 1. All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection. 2. For their development, children need to the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world. 3. When these vital needs are frustrated and children are, instead, abused for the sake of the adults' needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired. 4. The normal reactions to such injury should be anger and pain. Since children in this hurtful kind of environment are forbidden to express their anger, however, and since it would be unbearable to experience their pain all alone, they are compelled to suppress their feelings, repress all memory of the trauma, and idealize those guilty of the abuse. Later they will have no memory of what was done to them. 5. Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide). 6. If these people become parents, they will then often direct acts of revenge for their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats. Child abuse is still sanctioned -- indeed, held in high regard -- in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents. 7. If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials and nurses to support the child and believe in her or him. 8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great-grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve their parents, whom they invariably love [I would say 'need' - SH] of all responsibility. 9. For some years now, it has been possible to prove, through new therapeutic methods, that repressed traumatic experiences of childhood are stored up in the body and, though unconscious, exert an influence even in adulthood. In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults -- that a child responds to and learns both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning. 10. In the light of this new knowledge, even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood need no longer remain shrouded in darkness. 11. Our sensitization to the cruelty with which children are treated, until now commonly denied, and to the consequences of such treatment will as a matter of course bring an end to the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation. 12. People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be -- both in their youth and in adulthood -- intelligent, responsive, empathic and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their own children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience, and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. It will be inconceivable to such people that earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel comfortable and safe in this world. Since it will not be their unconscious drive in life to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and creatively.

Absurd | Abuse | Anger | Behavior | Blame | Body | Childhood | Children | Consequences | Cruelty | Desire | Doubt | Emotions | Experience | Feelings | Honesty | Ignorance | Industry | Influence | Integrity | Intimidation | Kill | Knowledge | Life | Life | Light | Logic | Love | Memory | Need | Opportunity | Order | Pain | Parents | People | Pleasure | Power | Principles | Regard | Respect | Revenge | Safe | Society | Tenderness | War | Will | Youth | Cruelty | Society | Following | Respect | Youth | Child | Guilty |

René Margritte, fully René François Ghislain Magritte

There are some men here on earth who know what true intellectual honesty is and who want no part of this inertia nor expect any help from it. The countless others are indifferent, passive, clumsy calculators, or dishonest. Their number is not enough to make them right.

Earth | Enough | Honesty | Men | Inertia |

Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach

Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.

Conscience | Honesty |

Richard Dawkins

Yet the final indictment against the television decision-makers is more profound and more serious. Their recent splurge of paranormalism debauches true science and undermines the efforts of their own excellent science departments. The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudo-scientific charlatans. The public appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of television, without compromising the principles of honesty and reason.

Appetite | Enough | Honesty | Need | Principles | Public | Science | Television | Truth | Universe | Wonder |

Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

This administration has proved that it is utterly incapable of cleaning out the corruption which has completely eroded it and reestablishing the confidence and faith of the American people in the morality and honesty of their government employees.

Administration | Confidence | Corruption | Faith | Government | Honesty | Morality | People | Government |

Robertson Davies

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

Honesty | Power | Wealth | Will |

Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll

I have made up my mind that if there is a God, he will be merciful to the merciful. Upon that rock I stand. That he will not torture the forgiving. Upon that rock I stand. That every man should be true to himself, and that there is no world, no star, in which honesty is a crime. Upon that rock I stand. The honest man, the good woman, the happy child, have nothing to fear, either in this world or the world to come. Upon that rock I stand.

Good | Happy | Honesty | Man | Mind | Nothing | Torture | Will | World |

Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

Coming in, I was denounced as a fraud by all the extreme men of the opposing party, and as an ingrate and a traitor by the same class of men in my own party. Going out, I have the good will, blessings, and approval of the best people of all parties and sections.

Confidence | Contrast | Fame | Giving | Greatness | History | Honesty | Logic | Modesty | Position | Sound | Success | Think |

Salvador Dalí, fully Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.

Good | Honesty |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

He that has a home, and a family, has given hostages to the community for good citizenship, but he that has no such connecting interests, is exposed to temptation, to idleness, and in danger of becoming useless, if not a burden and a nuisance in society.

Honesty | Power | Wealth | Will |

Samuel Smiles

Men cannot be raised in masses as the mountains were in he early geological states of the world. They must be dealt with as units; for it is only by the elevation of individuals that the elevation of the masses can be effectively secured.

Character | Civilization | Conduct | Example | Future | Good | Honesty | Influence | Life | Life | Men | Present | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Time |

Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.

Honesty | Man | Selfishness | Will |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

We must set the end in view as the goal; and then, instead of making a fetish of some particular kind of means, we should adopt whatever honorable means will best accomplish the end. In so far as unrestricted individual liberty brings the best results, we should encourage it. But when a point is reached where this complete lack of restriction on individual liberty fails to achieve the best results, then, on behalf of the whole people, we should exercise the collective power of the people, through the State Legislatures in matters of purely local concern, and through the National Legislature when the purpose is so big that only National action can achieve it.

Administration | Control | Destiny | Duty | Freedom | Good | Honesty | Individual | Initiative | Order | Right | Sense | Struggle | World |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

You ask that Mr. Taft shall let the world know what his religious belief is. This is purely his own private concern; it is a matter between him and his Maker, a matter for his own conscience; and to require it to be made public under penalty of political discrimination is to negative the first principles of our Government, which guarantee complete religious liberty, and the right to each to act in religious affairs as his own conscience dictates. Mr. Taft never asked my advice in the matter, but if he had asked it, I should have emphatically advised him against thus stating publicly his religious belief. The demand for a statement of a candidate’s religious belief can have no meaning except that there may be discrimination for or against him because of that belief. Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths. The inevitable result of entering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful conditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization.

Ability | Business | Cleanliness | Courage | Duty | Good | Honesty | Intention | Man | Men | People | Public | Qualities | Righteousness | Truth | Weakness | Will | Work | Business |

Thomas Jefferson

I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.

Credit | Honesty |

Thomas Jefferson

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Avarice | Body | Chance | Honesty | Opportunity | Public |

Thomas Jefferson

The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent ... It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.

Action | Evil | Future | Good | Honesty | Imperfection | Motives | Reason | Sense | Society | Sound | Society | Happiness |

Thomas Jefferson

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Action | Evil | Future | Good | Honesty | Motives | Reason | Society | Sound | Society | Happiness |

Thomas Jefferson

When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.

Action | Evil | Future | Good | Honesty | Motives | Reason | Sense | Society | Sound | Society | Happiness |