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

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

Two things are going on at the same time with the flattening of the world: The relentless quest for efficiency is squeezing some of the fat out of life.

Better | Change | Energy | Example | Power | System | Wants | Old |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand.

Progress | System |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street-corners or the opinions of the newspapers. A nation is led by a man who hears more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice. Such is the man who leads a great, free, democratic nation.

Action | Credit | Destroy | Determination | Future | Growth | Men | Money | Public | Question | Reason | System |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

We’ve been here before. Each century, as we push out the frontiers of human knowledge, work at every level becomes more complex, requiring more pattern recognition and problem solving.

Reward | Risk | System |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

The lower classes of people in Europe may at some future period be much better instructed then they are at present; they may be taught to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at the ale-house; they may live under better and more equal laws than they have hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it possible, though not probable, that they may have more leisure; but it is not in the nature of things, that they can be awarded such a quantity of money or substance, as will allow them all to marry early, in the full confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous family.

Law | Love | Sentiment | System |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.

Office | People | Public | Regret | Right | System | Crisis |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.

System | Truth |

Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Life | Life | Men | System | Will |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

Age | Agony | Beauty | Body | Children | Cost | Counsel | Diversity | Energy | Enough | Evil | Genius | Gold | Government | Helpfulness | Individual | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Model | Riches | Strength | Struggle | Sympathy | System | Will | World | Riches | Government | Counsel | Beauty |

Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV

What must be the knowledge of Him, from whom all created minds have derived both their power of knowledge, and the innumerable objects of their knowledge! What must be the wisdom of Him, from whom all things derive their wisdom!

Education | Existence | Government | Industry | Learning | Man | Marriage | Refinement | World | Government |

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

Energy | Life | Life | Philosophy | Science | Sense | System | Teach |

Thurgood Marshall

The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.

Government | Individual | Respect | System | Government | Respect |

Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

Fonda was neither wrong nor unconscionable in what she said and did in North Vietnam.

Means | People | Reform | Success | System |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

A writer's first obligation is not to the many-bellied beast but to the many-tongued beast, not to Society, but to Language. Everyone has a stake in the husbandry of Society, but Language is the writer's special charge. A grandiose animal it is, too. If it weren't for Language there wouldn't be Society.

Meaning | System |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

Consider the peaceful repose of the sausage compared with the aggressiveness and violence of bacon.

System | Will |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

Now, the line that separates objects from ideas can be pretty twiggy, but let's not unzip that pair of pants. Galileo was right to drop objects rather than ideas off of his tower, and the Care Fest might have been wise to stick with objects, as well. Within the normal range of perception, the behavior of objects can be measured and predicted. Ignoring the possibility that in the wrong hands almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial; ignoring, for the moment, the far more interesting possibility that every object might lead a secret life, it is still safe to say that objects, as we understand them, are relatively stable, whereas ideas are definitely unstable, they not only can be misused, they invite misuse--and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless.

God | Good | System | God |

Cynthia Kenyon

One grad student can do things in an hour that evolution could not do in a billion years.

Rights | System |

Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average.

Balance | Enough | Good | Need | System |

Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle

There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.

Action | Means | System | Time | Leader |