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

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft. Look at the United States; they have not had one since Lincoln.

Crime |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

Make every speaker as soon as he tells all he knows, sit down. That will shorten our speeches so much you will be out by lunch time.

Crime |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

The day of the guy working for himself is past. We are living in an age of Mergers. When your business is not doing good you combine with something and sell more stock. The poor little fellow, he can't combine with anything but the Sheriff in case he is going broke, which he generally is. But Big Business merges with another that's not going good and both do nothing together. But it's one of the mental weaknesses of the American people that if two things go together they think it must be great. They don't know how it will be financially, but they know that the stock will go up, and that's all they think about, never mind the dividends.

Crime |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.… Hence every sincere break with Communism is a religious experience.

Guilt | Innocence | Life | Life | Man | Will | Woman |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

Is dirt nice? Is death nice? Above all is dying nice? And, in the end, we must ask, is God nice? I doubt it.

Guilt |

Wilhelm Reich

Under the influence of politicos, the masses blame the powers that be for wars. In the first world war it was the munition magnates, in the second the Psychopath General. This is shifting the responsibility. The blame for the war belongs only and alone to the same masses of people who have all the means of preventing wars. The same masses of people who — partly through indolent passivity, partly through their active behavior — make possible the catastrophes from which they themselves suffer most horribly. To emphasize this fault of the masses, to give them the full responsibility, means taking them seriously. On the other hand, to pity the masses as a poor victim means treating them like a helpless child. The first is the attitude of the genuine fighter for freedom, the latter is the attitude of the politico.

Guilt | Influence | Means | People | Power | Responsibility | War | World |

Wilhelm Reich

Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. Migratory cancer cells are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political. It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!

Anxiety | Anxiety | Existence | Experience | Fighting | Freedom | Guilt | Knowledge | Love | Meaning | Means | Money | Organization | People | Power | Precision | Self-determination | Sin | Weapons | Will | Precision | Old |

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

I don’t measure my life by the money I’ve made. Other people might, but certainly don’t.

Charity | Day | Guilt | Little | Money | Nothing | People | Rest | Wife |

Wendell Berry

No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.

Abstract | Art | Dependence | Earth | Family | Giving | Good | Guilt | Individual | Little | Means | Nature | Need | Present | Thought | Usefulness | Work | Art | Guilty | Thought |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

To know all is to forgive all. No commonplace is more untrue. Behavior, whether conditioned by an individual neurosis or by society, can be understood, that is to say, one knows exactly why such and such an individual behaves as he does. But a personal action or deed is always mysterious. When we really act, precisely because it is a matter of free choice, we can never say exactly why we do this rather than that. But it is only deeds that we are required to forgive. If someone does me an injury, the question of forgiveness only arises if I am convinced (a) that the injury he did me was a free act on his part and therefore no less mysterious to him than to me, and (b) that it was me personally whom he meant to injure. He knows as well as they do why they are doing this -- they are a squad, detailed to execute a criminal. They do not know what they are doing, because it is not their business, as executioners, to know whom they are crucifying. If the person who does me an injury does not know what he is doing, then it is as ridiculous for me to talk about forgiving him as it would be for me to forgive a tile which falls on my head in a gale.

Choice | Guilt | Means | Sense | Sin | Guilty |

W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

When the Church obtained the direction of the civil power, she soon modified or abandoned the tolerant maxims she had formerly inculcated; and, in the course of a few years, restrictive laws were enacted, both against the Jews and against the heretics.

Guilt | Judgment | Love | Men | Truth | Will |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

I enjoyed the mathematics that I had time to learn. If I ever need or want to learn some more, I shall not be afraid to do so.

Crime | Energy | Force | Fulfillment | Good | Important | Individual | Learning | Little | Means | Sense | Society | Will | Wishes | Society |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

The aim of scientific education, as I see it, is to produce workers in all departments of knowledge in their due proportions; to encourage communication between workers in different fields, and also between them and the general community; to raise the intellectual standards and intellectual interests of the whole country.

Crime |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong

Crime | People | Suffering | Time |

Vittorio Alfieri

Where there are laws, he who has not broken them need not tremble.

Crime |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

The fate of a nation has often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister.

Better | Crime | Distrust | Eternal | God | Grace | Insult | Prayer | Insult | God |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

While loving glory so much how can you persist in a plan which will cause you to lose it?

Atheism | Crime | Fanaticism | Passion |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

Self-knowledge is everything. If you know what you are all about, you know what life is all about. You are not separate from life; you are life itself.

Crime |

Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

Achievement | Change | Guilt | Opportunity | Optimism | Reason | Suffering | Tragedy |