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

Edward J. Jurji

The contribution of religion to the unity of all human beings is made, not in the intellectual but in the spiritual realm.

Religion | Unity |

Stuart Kauffman, fully Stuart Alan Kauffman

If we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.

Myth | Order | Organization | Self | Will | Understand |

John Koster

Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness.

Atheism | History | Machines | Man | Men | Need | People | Thinking | Universe | Learn | Think |

Ron Leifer, fully Ronald Leifer

Most of the inmates of mental hospitals have been committed as the result of a petition by a family member. Psychiatric commitment is often the result of an acute or prolonged family disruption, which results in the exclusion and isolation of one member (usually the least powerful). Psychiatric commitment therefore serves to relieve intolerable family conflicts by removing one member from the group.

Commitment | Family | Isolation |

Aldo Leopold

As nearly as I can see, all the new isms – Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and especially the late but not lamented Technocracy – outdo even Capitalism itself in their preoccupation with one thing: The distribution of more machine-made commodities to more people. They all proceed on the theory that if we can all keep warm and full, and all own a Ford and a radio, the good life will follow. Their programs differ only in ways to mobilize machines to this end. Though they despise each other, they are all, respect of this objective, as identically alike as peas in a pod. They are competitive apostles of a single creed: salvation by machinery.

Capitalism | Creed | Despise | Good | Life | Life | Machines | People | Respect | Salvation | Will | Respect |

Lawrence Kohlberg

Moral thought seems to behave like all other kinds of thought. Progress through the moral levels and stages is characterized by increasing differentiation and increasing integration, and hence is the same kind of progress that scientific theory presents.

Integration | Progress | Thought | Thought |

Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

Anarchism (from the Greek… contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – Harmony in such a society not being obtained by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted form the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.

Authority | Conduct | Government | Harmony | Law | Life | Life | Obedience | Society | Submission | Society | Government |

Michael Lerner

What the schools can teach is what we value as a community… love, empathy, caring, cooperation, commitment to others, spiritual and ethical sensitivity, respect for difference, self-discipline, tolerance and honesty.

Commitment | Cooperation | Discipline | Empathy | Honesty | Love | Respect | Self | Teach | Respect | Value |

Bibhuti Mazumder

The quality of a person’s life is directly proportional to the degree of responsibility he takes for his own life and the commitment he makes to change for the better. Don’t be afraid of pains and sufferings. They are divine gifts for our growth.

Better | Change | Commitment | Growth | Life | Life | Responsibility | Afraid |

Howard Lowry

Reflection is easy and commitment is easy; but the two together - that is an educational task demanding the highest powers.

Commitment | Reflection |

John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman

True religion is slow in growth, and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgment; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself: it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers.

Growth | Religion |

Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL

The theory of war as an apt and proportionate means of solving international conflicts is now out of date.

Means | War |

Richard Powers

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

Control | Reverence | Science | Wonder |

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

The true problems of living – in politics, economics, education, marriage, etc. – are always problems of overcoming or reconciling opposites. They are divergent problems and have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. They demand of man not merely the employment of his reasoning powers but the commitment of his whole personality.

Commitment | Economics | Education | Man | Marriage | Personality | Politics | Problems | Sense |

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

The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge… Nothing becomes truly “one’s own” except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice… The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but the gift of knowledge makes them free.

Aid | Effort | Knowledge | Nothing | People | Sacrifice |

Louis Auguste Sabatier

And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.

Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |