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

Alice Miller, née Rostovski

The following points are intended to amplify my meaning: 1. All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection. 2. For their development, children need to the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world. 3. When these vital needs are frustrated and children are, instead, abused for the sake of the adults' needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired. 4. The normal reactions to such injury should be anger and pain. Since children in this hurtful kind of environment are forbidden to express their anger, however, and since it would be unbearable to experience their pain all alone, they are compelled to suppress their feelings, repress all memory of the trauma, and idealize those guilty of the abuse. Later they will have no memory of what was done to them. 5. Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide). 6. If these people become parents, they will then often direct acts of revenge for their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats. Child abuse is still sanctioned -- indeed, held in high regard -- in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents. 7. If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials and nurses to support the child and believe in her or him. 8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great-grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve their parents, whom they invariably love [I would say 'need' - SH] of all responsibility. 9. For some years now, it has been possible to prove, through new therapeutic methods, that repressed traumatic experiences of childhood are stored up in the body and, though unconscious, exert an influence even in adulthood. In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults -- that a child responds to and learns both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning. 10. In the light of this new knowledge, even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood need no longer remain shrouded in darkness. 11. Our sensitization to the cruelty with which children are treated, until now commonly denied, and to the consequences of such treatment will as a matter of course bring an end to the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation. 12. People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be -- both in their youth and in adulthood -- intelligent, responsive, empathic and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their own children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience, and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. It will be inconceivable to such people that earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel comfortable and safe in this world. Since it will not be their unconscious drive in life to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and creatively.

Absurd | Abuse | Anger | Behavior | Blame | Body | Childhood | Children | Consequences | Cruelty | Desire | Doubt | Emotions | Experience | Feelings | Honesty | Ignorance | Industry | Influence | Integrity | Intimidation | Kill | Knowledge | Life | Life | Light | Logic | Love | Memory | Need | Opportunity | Order | Pain | Parents | People | Pleasure | Power | Principles | Regard | Respect | Revenge | Safe | Society | Tenderness | War | Will | Youth | Cruelty | Society | Following | Respect | Youth | Child | Guilty |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

The question of integrity will get finer and finer and more delicate and more beautiful.

Integrity | Question | Will |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

We are here as local information harvesters, local problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The fact that we get away from physical problems doesn't mean we go away from problems. The problems are really rarely physical.

Integrity | Problems |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

We evolute toward ever lesser brain comprehension lags — ergo, toward ever diminishing error; ergo, ever diminishing misunderstandings; ergo, ever diminishing fear, and its brain-lagging painful errors of objectivity; wherefore we approach eternal instantaneity of absolute and total comprehension. The eternal instantaneity of no lag at all. However, we have now learned from our generalizations of the great complexity of the interactions of principles as we are disembarrassed of our local, exclusively physical chemistry of information-sensing devices — that what is approached is eternal and instant awareness of absolute reality of all that ever existed. All the great metaphysical integrity of all the individuals, which is potential and inherent in the complex interactions of generalized principles, will always and only coexist eternally.

Absolute | Awareness | Eternal | Integrity | Principles | Reality | Will | Awareness |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.

Discovery | Evolution | God | Individual | Integrity | Mind | Truth | Discovery | God |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.

Humanity | Integrity |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists. Each of the chemical elements is a pattern integrity. Each individual is a pattern integrity. The pattern integrity of the human individual is evolutionary and not static.

Individual | Integrity | Virtue | Virtue |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

All the great metaphysical integrity of all the individuals, which is potential and inherent in the complex interactions of generalized principles, will always and only coexist eternally.

Integrity | Will |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

Humanity | Individual | Integrity | Majority | Relationship | Leadership | Understand |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.

Evolution | Integrity | Success | Will |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual . . . the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative . . . the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.

Action | Fear | Individual | Initiative | Integrity | Power | Sense | Wisdom |

Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.

Conformity | Creativity | Integrity | Life | Life | Universe |

William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel

Despite the cascade of empirical evidence that even the present scale human economic activity threatens to undermine the integrity of the ecosphere, there is little evidence in the international policy arena that mainstream institutions are seriously willing to consider abandoning perpetual growth machine. Indeed, policy makers generally believe that the Malthusian dilemma and concerns about ‘limits to growth’ have long been put to rest.

Evidence | Growth | Integrity | Little | Policy | Present |

Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk business.

Business | Integrity | Business |

Pandurang Shastri Athavale, fully Pandurang Vaijnath Shastri Athavale

Neither the military might nor the economic and technological development makes a nation great. It is made great by its citizens with Self Respect and Integrity ingrained in their lives.

Integrity | Respect | Self | Respect |

Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

Now listen here: Printing top secret information... I don't care how they feel about the war. Whether they're for or against it. They can't and should not do this and attack the integrity of government and by God, I'm gonna fight that son of a bitching paper. They don't know what's gonna hit them now.

Care | Government | Integrity | Government |

Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

Character | Faith | Integrity | Man |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.

Fortitude | Gold | Integrity | Prudence | Prudence | Value |

Stephan Jay Gould

Eugene Dubois is no hero in my book, if only because I share the spirit of his unorthodoxies, but disagree so strongly with his version, and regard his supporting arguments as so weakly construed and so willfully blind to opposing evidence (the dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without).

Cost | Integrity | Price |