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

Eudora Welty

For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

Art | Awareness | Mortal | Past | Present | Art | Awareness |

Eugene Peterson

I have my doubts (that the schools will open on time). We have a law case out of Sojourner-Douglass, and at Chesapeake we have all kinds of issues.

Expectation | God | Illusion | Imagination | Meaning | Means | Will | Work | God | Expectation |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Considered from the love in the real laws and in social forms of sexual union.

Desire | Means |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

The moral is the only science of man comes to the welfare of man.

Means | Work |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

Heart | Kill | Love | Past | Reading | Time |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

Means | Pleasure | Protest | Old |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Professor Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.

Business | Enough | Kill | Business |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us.

History | People | Thought | Will | Think | Thought |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

Age | Attention | Land | Order | Past |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties — differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests — they have the same principles under varying colors, are equally corrupt and are one in their subservience to capital and their hostility to labor.

Birth | Death | Means |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The behavior of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

Good | Little | Past | Present | Thought | World | Thought |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about.

Public |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge.

Change | Democracy | Means |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.

Means | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Power |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable.

Evidence | Inconvenient | Love | Means | Will |

Eustace Budgell

In short, a private education seems the most natural method for the forming of a virtuous man; a public education for making a man of business. The first would furnish out a good subject for PlatoÂ’s republic, the latter a member for a community overrun with artifice and corruption.

Education | Means | Men | Nothing | Order | Reason | Service | Temper | Think |

Euripedes NULL

Who then will dare to say I'm weak or timid? No, they'll say I'm loyal as a friend, ruthless as a foe, so much like a hero destined for glory.

Learning | Past | Youth | Youth |