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

D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

The Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once again slaves.

Children | Liberty | Men |

Felix Frankfurter

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.

History | Liberty |

Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright

Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.

Liberty | Soul |

Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright

But while human liberty has engaged the attention of the enlightened, and enlisted the feelings of the generous of all civilized nations, may we not enquire if this liberty has been rightly understood?

Attention | Feelings | Liberty |

Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright

Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny.

Liberty |

George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne

A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.

Entertainment | Liberty | Mind | Nothing |

F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Individual | Liberty |

George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Liberty | Means | People | Right |

Gouverneur Morris

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Blessings | Liberty | Order | People |

George Washington

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Bigotry | Conscience | Giving | Good | Government | Indulgence | Liberty | Mankind | People | Policy | Right | Toleration | Government |

George William Curtis

Our common liberty is consecrated by a common sorrow.

Liberty |

George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.

Deviation | Liberty | Opinion |

Henri Frédéric Amiel

Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell—all these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him, or as Angelus, I think, said, "the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me."

Boldness | Church | Eternal | God | Heart | Heaven | Irony | Liberty | Man | Meaning | Present | Will | God |

Henrik Ibsen, aka Henrik Johan Ibsen

He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands still in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by so doing that he has just lost it. Now this very contentedness in the possession of a dead liberty is characteristic of the so-called State, and, as I have said, it is not a good characteristic.

Aspiration | Good | Liberty | Man | Qualities | Struggle | Aspiration |

Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Absence | Individual | Liberty | Responsibility |

Dajian Hui-neng or Huineng

When our mind works freely without any hindrance, and is at liberty to 'come' or to 'go', we attain Samadhi of Prajna, or liberation. Such a state is called the function of 'thoughtlessness'. But to refrain from thinking of anything, so that all thoughts are suppressed, is to be Dharma-ridden, and this is an erroneous view.

Liberty | Mind | Thinking |

Jacques Monod

Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the 'prebiotic soup.'

Absolute | Chance | Liberty | Life | Life |

J. W. Fulbright, fully James William Fulbright

It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.

Imagination | Individual | Law | Liberty | System |