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

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

And yet every so often, the heart of America, shuddering with indignation, sends a nervous spasm through the gentle back of the Andes, and tumultuous shock waves assault the surface of the land. Three times the cuppola of proud Santo Domingo has collapsed from on high to the rhythm of broken bones and its worn walls have opened and fallen too. But the foundations they rest on are unmoved, the great blocks of the Temple of the Sun exhibit their gray stone indifferently; however colossal the disaster befalling its oppressor, not one of its huge rocks shifts from its place.

Life | Life | Man | Property | Worth |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

If any person has a good word for the previous government that is good enough for me to have him shot.

Life | Life |

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

I believe, therefore, that the best way to make contact with the essential problem is by speaking of technology: economic development in poverty-stricken areas can be fruitful only on the basis of what I have called "intermediate technology." In the end, intermediate technology will be "labor-intensive" and will lend itself to the use of small-scale establishments

Life | Life | People | Poverty |

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

It is true that all men are brothers, but it is also true that in our active personal relationships we can, in fact, be brothers to only a few of them, and we are called upon to show more brotherliness to them than we could possibly show to the whole of mankind.

Life | Life | Position | World |

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

Even an economist might well ask: what is the point of economic progress, a so-called higher standard of living, when the earth, the only earth we have, is being contaminated by substances which may cause malformations in our children or grandchildren?

Conduct | Doubt | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Man | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose | Will |

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

There are always some things which we do for their own sakes, and there are other things which we do for some other purpose. One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means-to-ends, and to have some sort of cohesive view and argument about this.

Health | Nature | Will | Crisis |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

If your heart vibrate looking Resist oppression then silence is a form of treason because

Beauty | Life | Life | People | Spirit | Understanding | Will | Beauty |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Revolutionaries filling the world banging for the world to not sleep weighed on the bodies of the poor.

Better | Birth | Hope | Labor | Life | Life | Time | Will |

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 |

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

Since there is now increasing evidence of environmental deterioration, particularly in living nature, the entire outlook and methodology of economics is being called into question. The study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insights, unless complemented and completed by a study of meta-economics.

Cooperation | Nature | Public | Will | Work |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

All the common phenomena of Morphology and Physiology, of Chorology and Œkology, of Ontology and Paleontology, can be explained by the theory of descent, and referred to simple mechanical causes. It is precisely in this, viz., that the primary simple causes of all these complex aggregates of phenomena are common to them all, and that other mechanical causes for them are unthinkable—it is in this that, to us, the guarantee of their certainty consists.

Day | Discussion | Nature | Society | Truth | Society |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis.

Life | Life |

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

There is no such thing as the viability of states or of nations, there is only a problem of viability of people: people, actual persons like you and me, are viable when they can stand on their own feet and earn their keep. You do not make non-viable people viable by putting large numbers of them into one huge community, and you do not make viable people non-viable by splitting a large community into a number of smaller, more intimate, more coherent and more manageable groups.

Life | Life |

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 |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

To which the senses retort; 'Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.'

Life | Life | Sense |

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

From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil.

Angels | Fear | Happy | Imagination | Life | Life | Magnanimity | Mockery | Nothing | Risk |

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

At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if produces more wisdom.

Nature |

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

The essence of educationÂ…is the transmission of values, but values do not help us to pick our way through life unless they have become our own, a part, so to say, of our mental make-up. This means that they are more than mere formulae or dogmatic assertions: that we think and feel with them, that they are the very instruments through which we look at, interpret, and experience the world.

Effort | Life | Life |