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

Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key

Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

Education |

Emile Zola

Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion! Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.

Crime | Guilt | Judgment | Opinion | Treason | Guilty |

Emma Goldman

One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.

Inevitable | Inferiority | Merit | Position | Question | Right | Woman |

Emma Goldman

It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.

Man |

Emma Goldman

The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.

Fear | Force | Life | Life | Meaning | Men | Opinion | Public | Receive | Right | Wants | Will | Woman | Work | Learn |

Eric S. Raymond

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

Education | Science |

Ernest Madu

We in the US can learn a good deal from studying those who achieve great things without having huge resources. this video is a strong statement against the mistake of Big Government thinking. imagine the access to health care we could achieve if we simply stepped back from our current unthinking debates and refactored the broken system.

Education |

Evgeny Morozov

The use of text messaging for propaganda purposes – known as “red-texting” – reveals another creative streak among China’s propaganda virtuosos. The practice may have grown out of a competition organized by one of China’s mobile phone operators to compose the most eloquent Party-admiring text message. Fast forward a few years, and senior telecom officials in Beijing are already busily attending “red-texting” symposia. “I really like these words of Chairman Mao: ‘The world is ours, we should unite for achievements. Responsibility and seriousness can conquer the world and the Chinese Communist Party members represent these qualities.’ These words are incisive and inspirational.” This is a text message that thirteen million mobile phone users in the Chinese city of Chongqing received one day in April 2009. Sent by Bo Xilai, the aggressive secretary of the city’s Communist Party who is speculated to have strong ambitions for a future in national politics, the messages were then forwarded another sixteen millions times. Not so bad for an odd quote from a long-dead Communist dictator.

Care | Corruption | Darkness | Education | Efficiency | Fear | Government | Justice | Model | Preference | Reading | Receive | Government |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

I've never vied for power in the family before. Pointing a box at the garage door and saying Open! was never a big deal, but holding that television tuner and realizing I alone control what is flashed on the screen brings out the Iacocca in me.

Fenwicke Lindsay Holmes

The greatest power in the world is the power our thought, for it is Creative Mind in action.

Education | History | Sense | Skepticism |

Ernest Becker

But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal.4 Or, putting it another way, normality is neurosis, and vice versa. We call a man "neurotic" when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him and he seeks clinical help for it—or others seek it for him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal" because it doesn't occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or another washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways.

Freedom | Guilt |

Ernest Becker

Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Body | Death | Education | Man | Means | Mistake | Taste | Will | Child |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.

Guilt | Knowledge | Right | Story | Writing |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Before we can talk about giving aid, we must have something to give. We do not have thousands of poverty-stricken villages in our country; so what do we know about effective methods of self-help in such circumstances?

Doubt | Education | Little | Mankind | Mortal |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

What we have today, in modern industrial society, is not romantic and certainly not utopianÂ…But it is in very deep trouble and holds no promise of survival. We jolly well have to have the courage to dream if we want to survive and give our children a chance of survival.

Education | Metaphysics | Present | Soul | World | Understand |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

We see that man entirely resembles the higher mammals, and most of all the apes, in embryonic development as well as in anatomic structure. And if we seek to understand this ontogenetic agreement in the light of the biogenetic law, we find that it proves clearly and necessarily the descent of man from a series of other mammals, and proximately from the primates.

Church | Education | Existence | Important | Influence | Need | Order | Public |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The word that most perfectly describes the city of Cuzco is evocative. Intangible dust of another era settles on its streets, rising like the disturbed sediment of a muddy lake when you touch its bottom.

Children | Education | Money | System |

Eugene Peterson

In the call to worship we hear GodÂ’s first word to us; in the benediction we hear GodÂ’s last word to us; in the Scripture lessons we hear God speaking to our fathers; in the sermon we hear that word re-expressed to us; in the hymns, which are all to a greater or lesser extent paraphrases of Scripture, the Word of God makes our prayers articulate.

Education |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to beat war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror,but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means.It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.