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

Ronald A. Heifetz

Of course, organizations, like all human systems, are highly complex. And the structures, culture, and defaults that define and maintain them prove tenacious. But they are tenacious for a reason. It took a long time for them to develop into self-reinforcing systems. They would have perished already if they were not fit to thrive in at least yesterday’s world.

Influence | Nature | Office | Will |

Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker

The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.

Little | Man | Office |

Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

The President of the United States should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves his country best.

Necessity | Office |

Saint Ambrose, born Aurelius Ambrosius NULL

Sin is the transgression of the divine law and disobedience of the heavenly precepts.

Nothing | Office | Wants |

Samuel Adams

He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections.

Control | Esteem | Fidelity | Friend | Influence | Justice | Liberty | Man | Men | Nothing | Office | Power | Restraint | Time | Trust | Will | Wise |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.

Courage | Guarantee | Office | Words | Happiness |

Ambrose, aka Saint Ambrose, fully Aurelius Ambrosius NULL

Sin is the transgression of the divine law and disobedience of the heavenly precepts.

Nothing | Office | Wants |

Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL

He whom you would punish through the malice of your envy, may probably escape, but you will never be able to fly from yourselves. Wherever you may be your adversary is with you, your sin rankles within. It must be a self-willed evil to persecute a person whom God has taken under the protection of His grace; it becomes an irremedial sin to hate a man whom God wishes to make happy.

Justice | Office |

Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

If I did not feel . . . and hope that someday - perhaps millions of years hence - the Kingdom of God would overspread the whole world . . . then I would give my office over this morning to anyone who would take it.

Faith | God | Hope | Office | Will | Work | God |

Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

In none of these countries [Russia, Italy and Germany] was it possible to make to the people such an appeal as went home to the heart of our people, an appeal based on Christianity or ethics ... The whole outlook in the dictator countries was so completely different from ours that for a long time people here could not understand how it was possible for these nations not to respond to the same kind of appeal as that to which our people responded. But they were beginning to realize it now...The only argument which appealed to the dictators was that of force.

God | Hope | Office | World | God |

Ignatius Loyola, aka Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Idleness begets a discontented life. It develops self-love, which is the cause of all our misery, and renders us unworthy to receive the favors of divine love.

Day | Office | Will |

Stephan Jay Gould

Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

Doubt | Evolution | God | Office | Position | Question | Reason | God |

Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

Art | Office | Art |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

To my mind the failure resolutely to follow progressive policies is the negation of democracy as well of progress, and spells disaster. But for this very reason I feel concern when progressives act with heedless violence, or go so far and so fast as to invite reaction. The experience of John Brown illustrates the evil of the revolutionary short-cut to ultimate good ends. The liberty of the slave was desirable, but it was not to be brought about by a slave insurrection. The better distribution of property is desirable, but it is not to be brought about by the anarchic form of Socialism which would destroy all private capital and tend to destroy all private wealth. It represents not progress, but retrogression, to propose to destroy capital because the power of unrestrained capital is abused. John Brown rendered a great service to the cause of liberty in the earlier Kansas days; but his notion that the evils of slavery could be cured by a slave insurrection was a delusion analogous to the delusions of those who expect to cure the evils of plutocracy by arousing the baser passions of workingmen against the rich in an endeavor at violent industrial revolution. And, on the other hand, the brutal and shortsighted greed of those who pro?t by what is wrong in the present system, and the attitude of those who oppose all effort to do away with this wrong, serve in their turn as incitements to such revolution; just as the insolence of the ultra pro-slavery men ?nally precipitated the violent destruction of slavery.

Conscience | Good | Justification | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Method | Office | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Salvation |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

No, I'm not a good shot, but I shoot often.

Distinction | Office | People |

Thomas Hardy

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.

Decision | Events | Mind | Office |

Thomas Jefferson

Dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.

Censor | Error | Majority | Office | Opinion | Persuasion | Reason | Uniformity | World |

Thomas Jefferson

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

Office |

Thomas Jefferson

If a monarchist be in office anywhere, and it be known to the President,

Death | Office |