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

Gustave Flaubert

Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most swagger monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a street-pavement, and a savage is better than a hairdresser!

Love | Plan |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

Worth |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.

Truth |

Haile Selassie

If a strong government finds that it can, with impunity, destroy a weak people, then the hour has struck for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment.

Hannah Arendt

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

Evil |

Hannah Arendt

Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.

Evil | Good |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Good |

Haile Selassie

Twenty-seven years ago, as Emperor of Ethiopia, I mounted the rostrum in Geneva, Switzerland, to address the League of Nations and to appeal for relief from the destruction which had been unleashed against my defenseless nation, by the Fascist invader.

Husband | Love |

Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland

No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.

Evil |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

No government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction... governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. It?s one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.

Evil | Man | Pleasure | Understanding |

Hannah Arendt

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is na‹ve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

Hannah Arendt

It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

Love |

Hannah Whitall Smith

Sight is not faith, and hearing is not faith, neither is feeling faith; but believing when we neither see, hear nor feel is faith; and everywhere the Bible tells us our salvation is to be by faith. Therefore we must believe before we feel, and often against our feelings, if we would honor God by our faith.

Evil |

Hannah Arendt

Power corrupts... when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power... far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one.

Evil | Malice | Think |

Hans Rosling

Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population.

Love | Old |

Hannah Whitall Smith

To be a mother is the greatest vocation in the world. No being has a position of such great power and influence. She holds in her hands the destiny of nations, for to her is necessarily committed the making of the nation?s citizens.

Evil |

Italian Proverbs

The devil turns away from a closed door.

Italian Proverbs

One good word quenches more heat than a bucket of water.

Thinking | Wickedness |

Italian Proverbs

She who is born a beauty is born betrothed.