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

Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend

When Western civilization invaded the Near and Far East and what is now called the Third World it imposed its own ideas of a proper environment and a rewarding life. Doing this, it disrupted the delicate patterns of adaptation and created problems that had not existed before.

Civilization | Ideas | Problems | World |

Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend

The ideas survived and they can now be said to be in agreement with reason. They survived because prejudice, passion, conceit, errors, sheer pigheadedness, in short because all the elements that characterize the context of discovery, opposed the dictates of reason and because these irrational elements were permitted to have their way. To express it differently: Copernicanism and other "rational" views exist today only because reason was overruled at some time in their past. (The opposite is also true: witchcraft and other "irrational" views had ceased to be influential only because reason was overruled at some time in their past.)

Ideas | Reason | Time |

Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Ideas | People |

Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend

Now - how can we possibly examine something we use all the time and presuppose in every statement? How can we criticize the terms in which we habitually express our observations? Let us see! The first step in our criticism of commonly-used concepts is to create a measure of criticism, something with which these concepts can be compared. Of course, we shall later want to know a little more about the measuring stick itself; for example, we shall want to know whether it is better than, or perhaps not as good as, the material examined. But in order for this examination to start there must be a measuring-stick in the first place. Therefore, the first step in our criticism of customary concepts and customary reactions is to step outside the circle and either to invent a new conceptual system, for example a new theory, that clashes with the most carefully established observational results and confounds with the most plausible theoretical principles, or to import such a system from outside science, from religion, from mythology, from the ideas of incompetents, or the ramblings of madmen. This step is, again, counter-inductive, Counter-induction is thus both a fact' - science could not exist without it - and a legitimate and much needed move in the game of science.

Better | Criticism | Example | Good | Ideas | Little | Order | Science | System | Time | Theoretical |

Paul Hawken

These timeless ways of being human are threatened by global forces that do not consider people’s deepest longings... For most people, to understand something new requires a cognitive antecedent... What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand... ideas question and liberate, while ideologies justify and dictate. Ecologists and biologists know that systems achieve stability and health through diversity, not uniformity. Ideologues take the opposite view. Neoconservatives believe that ordinary citizens cannot be entrusted with the reins of power, that a small group of superior individuals should rule over the majority of inferiors, using religion and the perpetual threat of war to create a Potemkin village of populism.

Global | Health | Ideas | Justify | Majority | Question | Religion | Rule | War | Understand |

Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.

Ideas | Value |

Pericles NULL

Having knowledge but lacking the power to express it clearly is no better than never having any ideas at all.

Better | Ideas | Knowledge | Power |

Pete Seeger, born Peter Seeger

I have been singing folksongs of America and other lands to people everywhere. I am proud that I never refused to sing to any group of people because I might disagree with some of the ideas of some of the people listening to me. I have sung for rich and poor, for Americans of every possible political and religious opinion and persuasion, of every race, color, and creed. The House committee wished to pillory me because it didn’t like some few of the many thousands of places I have sung for.

Ideas | Listening | Opinion | People |

Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling atmosphere of prejudice and traditions.

Force | Ideas | Life | Life | Prejudice | Revolution | Society | Society | Inertia | Old |

P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams… Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think scientifically that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution.

Allegories | Death | Expectation | Fate | Feelings | Hope | Ideas | Impression | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Nothing | Prison | Thought | World | Fate | Afraid | Expectation | Old | Think | Thought |

Peter Matthiessen

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

Beauty | Heart | Ideas | Instinct | Memory | Mystery | Sense | Beauty |

Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

In fact, it is certain that in proportion as the human mind frees itself from ideas inculcated by minorities of priests, military chiefs and judges, all striving to establish their domination, and of scientists paid to perpetuate it, a conception of society arises, in which conception there is no longer room for those dominating minorities. A society entering into possession of the social capital accumulated by the labor of preceding generations, organizing itself so as to make use of this capital in the interests of all, and constituting itself without reconstituting the power of the ruling minorities. It comprises in its midst an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies: it excludes none. It even calls for struggles and contentions; because we know that periods of contests, so long as they were freely fought out, without the weight of constituted authority being thrown on the one side of the balance, were periods when human genius took its mightiest flight and achieved the greatest aims. Acknowledging, as a fact, the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past, it no longer recognizes a division between exploited and exploiters, governed and governors, dominated and dominators, and it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst — not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association.

Authority | Genius | Ideas | Individual | Labor | Men | Mind | Power | Rights | Society | Society |

Peter Matthiessen

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

Beauty | Experience | Future | Ideas | Life | Life | Paradise | Precision | Present | Words | Precision | Beauty |

Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss

We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out.

Ideas |

Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery!" is not a vain formula; it has penetrated into the ideas of the great working-class masses; it filters through all the present literature; it even carries those along who live on the poverty of others, and takes from them the arrogance with which they formerly asserted their rights to exploitation.

Arrogance | Ideas | Liberty | Poverty | Present | Rights |

Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

The need for a new life becomes apparent. The code of established morality, that which governs the greater number of people in their daily life, no longer seems sufficient. What formerly seemed just is now felt to be a crying injustice. The morality of yesterday is today recognized as revolting immorality. The conflict between new ideas and old traditions flames up in every class of society, in every possible environment, in the very bosom of the family. ... Those who long for the triumph of justice, those who would put new ideas into practice, are soon forced to recognize that the realization of their generous, humanitarian and regenerating ideas cannot take place in a society thus constituted; they perceive the necessity of a revolutionary whirlwind which will sweep away all this rottenness, revive sluggish hearts with its breath, and bring to mankind that spirit of devotion, self-denial, and heroism, without which society sinks through degradation and vileness into complete disintegration.

Ideas | Life | Life | Mankind | Morality | Necessity | Need | People | Society | Spirit | Will | Society | Old |

Philip Lee Ralph

Heresy hunters are intolerant not only of unorthodox ideas; worse than that, they are intolerant of ideas -- of any ideas which are really alive and not empty cocoons.

Ideas |

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

I recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty; that concerning each of these principles our ideas have been utterly obscure.

Ideas | Meaning | Principles |

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

I have made every effort to obtain exact information, comparing doctrines, replying to objections, continually constructing equations and reductions from arguments, and weighing thousands of syllogisms in the scales of the most rigorous logic. In this laborious work, I have collected many interesting facts which I shall share with my friends and the public as soon as I have leisure. But I must say that I recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty; that concerning each of these principles our ideas have been utterly obscure; and, in fact, that this ignorance was the sole cause, both of the poverty that devours us, and of all the calamities that have ever afflicted the human race.

Effort | Ideas | Ignorance | Meaning | Poverty | Principles | Public | Friends |

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization.

Ideas |