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

Honoré de Balzac

It is no sin to be tempted; the wickedness lies in being overcome.

Character | Sin | Wickedness |

Joseph Brant, aka Thayendanegea

In the government you called civilized, the happiness of the people is constantly sacrificed to the splendor of the empire. Hence the origin of your codes of criminal and civil laws; hence your dungeons and prisons. We have no prisons; we have no written laws; and yet judges are as highly revered among us as they are among you, and their decisions are as much regarded. We have among us no exalted villains above the control of our laws. Daring wickedness is here never allowed to triumph over helpless innocence. The estates of widows and orphans are never devoured by enterprising swindlers. We have no robbery under the pretext of law.

Character | Control | Daring | Government | Innocence | Law | People | Wickedness | Government | Happiness |

Publius Syrus

The wickedness of the few is the calamity of the many.

Calamity | Character | Wickedness | Calamity |

Francis Quarles

In the commission of evil, fear no man so much as thyself; another is but one witness against thee, thou art a thousand; another thou mayest avoid, thyself thou canst not. Wickedness is its own punishment.

Art | Character | Evil | Fear | Man | Punishment | Wickedness | Witness | Art |

Francis Quarles

In the commission of evil, fear no man so much as thyself. Another is but one witness against thee; thou art a thousand. Another thou mayst avoid, thyself thou canst not. Wickedness is its own punishment.

Art | Character | Evil | Fear | Man | Punishment | Wickedness | Witness | Art |

Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

The aim that comedy has in view is the same as that of the highest destiny of man, and this consists in liberating himself from the influence of violent passions, and taking a calm and lucid survey of all that surrounds him, and also of his own being, and of seeing everywhere occurrence rather than fate or hazard, and ultimately rather smiling at the absurdities than shedding tears and feeling anger at sight of the wickedness of man.

Anger | Character | Comedy | Destiny | Fate | Hazard | Influence | Man | Tears | Wickedness | Fate |

Thomas Jefferson

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.

Corruption | Cunning | Degeneracy | Earth | Government | People | Safe | Weakness | Wickedness | Will | Wisdom | Government |

Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev

The world is full of wickedness and misery precisely because it is based on freedom – yet that freedom constitutes the whole dignity of man and of his world. Doubtless at the price of its repudiation evil and suffering could be abolished, and the world forced to be “good” and “happy”; but man would have lost his likeness to God, which primarily resides in his freedom.

Dignity | Evil | Freedom | God | Good | Happy | Man | Price | Suffering | Wickedness | World |

New York Times Editorial on the Holocaust NULL

It was and it is to do all that can be done to eradicate an evil thing out of our civilization… a thing so incredibly wicked that it would not have been believable of modern man if it had not actually occurred. This evil, this wickedness began with intolerance and hate in a few men’s hearts. It spread until it almost wrecked the world. Now the obligation is to remember, not in hate, not in the spirit of revenge, but so that this spirit cannot ever flourish again so long as man remains on earth. And to this end, let us begin, each of us, by looking into our own hearts.

Civilization | Earth | Evil | Hate | Intolerance | Man | Men | Obligation | Revenge | Spirit | Wickedness | World |

Thomas Paine

[The Bible] is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.

Bible | History | Mankind | Wickedness |

Aristotle NULL

It is deliberate purpose that constitutes wickedness and criminal guilt.

Guilt | Purpose | Purpose | Wickedness |

Eugenio Maria de Hostos (y Bonilla)

Lend your light to the blind. Why should the wickedness of men irritate you, when it is only blindness?

Light | Men | Wickedness |

Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions.

Art | Consciousness | Crime | Emotions | Eternal | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Inspiration | Man | Men | Mind | Misfortune | Nature | Opinion | Perception | Pleasure | Power | Present | Sense | Soul | Thought | Wickedness | Misfortune | Art | Thought |

James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude

There is no wickedness so desperate or deceptive - we can never foresee its consequences. Of all the evil spirits abroad in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous.

Consequences | Evil | Insincerity | Wickedness | World |

Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt

Every successful wickedness is, to say the least, a scandal... The only lesson to be derived from the successful misdeeds of the strong is to hold life here and now in no higher esteem than it deserves.

Esteem | Lesson | Life | Life | Wickedness |

Katherine Anne Porter, born Callie Russell Porter

The whole effort for the past one hundred years has been to remove the moral responsibility from the individual and make him blame his own human wickedness on his society, but he helps to make his society, you see, and he will not take his responsibility for his part in it.

Blame | Effort | Individual | Past | Responsibility | Wickedness | Will |