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

Gustavo GutiƩrrez

If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.

Think |

Gustave Flaubert

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Men |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour?all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.

Men |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.

Gustave Flaubert

You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

Men | Wise |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

Appetite | Waiting |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

Men |

Hans Reichenbach

The famous assertion by Einstein that the length of a rod depends on its velocity and on the chosen definition of simultaneity. ...is based on the fact that we do not measure the length of the rod, but its projection on a system at rest. How the length of the projection depends on the choice of simultaneity can be illustrated by reference to a photograph taken through a focal-plane shutter. Such a shutter... consists of a wide band with a horizontal slit, which slides down vertically. Different bands are photographed successively on the film. Moving objects are therefore strangely distorted; the wheels of a rapidly moving car for instance, appear to be slanted. The shape of the objects in the picture will evidently depend on the speed of the shutter. Similarly, the length of the moving segment depends on the definition of simultaneity. One definition of simultaneity differs from another because events that are simultaneous for one definition occur successively for another. What may be a simultaneity projection of a moving segment for one definition is a "focal-plane shutter photograph" for another.

Men |

Hannah Arendt

Men in plural? can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.

Italian Proverbs

Skip the enjoyment that you will regret.

Ideas | Right |

Italian Proverbs

One who speaks fair words feeds you with an empty spoon.

Attention | Change | Conversation | Global | Land | Need |

Italian Proverbs

Of this world each man has as much as he takes.

Life | Life | Men |

Italian Proverbs

Sometimes it is better to give your apple away, than to eat it yourself.

Absolute | Belief |

Italian Proverbs

One should learn to sail in all winds.

Future | Will |

Italian Proverbs

Not all words require an answer.

Better | God | Will | God |

Italian Proverbs

No sooner is the law made than its evasion is discovered.

Evil | Men |

Italian Proverbs

The ass does not know the worth of this tail till he has lost it.

Books | Character | Effort | Hope | Judgment | Will | Work | Realism |

Italian Proverbs

That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.

Dawn | Evolution | History | Individual | Life | Life | Sense | Survival | Truth |

Italian Proverbs

The first blow is as good as two.

Courage | Mankind | Men | Peace | Strength | Tears | Will |