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

In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most precious resource, our entire way of live is involved, and before our policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change. It is not a question of what we can afford but of what we choose to spend our money on. If we could return to a generous recognition of meta-economic values, our landscapes would become healthy and beautiful again and our people would regain the dignity of manÂ…

Excitement | Man | Nature | Society | System | Society |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is

Awe | Heart | Joy | Light | Man | Men | Pain | Self | Time | Woman |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

They tell me if you see a slave sleeping do not wake him lest he dreamed of freedom and tell them if you see a slave sleeping and told him about freedom

Man |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

At the lowest stage, the rude--we may say animal--phase of prehistoric primitive man, is the "ape-man," who, in the course of the tertiary period, has only to a limited degree raised himself above his immediate pithecoid ancestors, the anthropoid apes. Next come successive stages of the lowest and simplest kind of culture, such as only the rudest of still existing primitive peoples enable us in some measure to conceive. These "savages" are succeeded by peoples of a low civilization, and from these again, by a long series of intermediate steps, we rise little by little to the more highly civilized nations. To these alone--of the twelve races of mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian--are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years of the organic world's development.

Arrogance | Earth | Illusion | Man | Mother | Organic | Position | Universe |

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

We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing, and in heedless urbanization. If we permit them, this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over.

Absurd | Error | Man | Nature |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.

Man | Weapons |

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 |