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

Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.

Force | Nations | Need | Obsession | War | Think |

Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

Earth | World | Think |

Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership - not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.

Dreams | Evil | Freedom | Love | Peace | Policy | Slavery | Will | Learn |

Ronald A. Heifetz

There are lots of things in life that are worth the pain… Being a leader is one of them.

Coercion |

Ronald A. Heifetz

Exercising leadership is an expression of your aliveness... But when you cover yourself up, you risk losing something as well. In the struggle to save yourself, you can give up too many of those qualities that are the essence of being alive, like innocence, curiosity, and compassion.

Authority | Expectation | Means | Order | People | Position | Expectation | Leadership |

Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

Faith | Focus | Important | Suspicion |

Salvatore Quasimodo

At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds.

Birth |

Stephan Jay Gould

Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck originally evolved for this purpose. The neck may have first lengthened in context of a different use, and then been coopted for better dining when giraffes moved into the open plains. Or the neck may have evolved to perform several functions at once. We cannot learn the reasons for historical origin simply by listing current uses.

Design | System | Unity |

Stephen Hawking

As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable.

Action | Change | Duty | Learning | Life | Life | Public | Right | Weapons | Understand |

Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen

Al Gore is not just whistling in the wind. Global warming is for real. Every scientist knows that now, and we are on our way to the destruction of every species on earth, if we don't pay attention and reverse our course.

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Fear | Man | Nothing |

Thomas Merton

God seeks Himself in us, and the aridity and sorrow of our heart is the sorrow of God who is not known in us, who cannot find Himself in us because we do not dare to believe or trust the incredible truth that He could live in us, and live there out of choice, out of preference.

Asceticism | Battle | God | Good | Gratitude | Life | Life | Light | Man | Perfection | Pleasure | Purity | Rest | Simplicity | Struggle | Terror | World | Asceticism | God | Afraid |

William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen

If, as it appears, it was an act of terrorists, then we will do everything in our power to track them down and hold them accountable.

Controversy | Destroy | Enemy | Exploit | Society | Weapons | Will | Society |

William Blake

The moment of desire! The moment of desire! The virgin that pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys in the secret shadows of her chamber: the youth shut up from the lustful joy shall forget to generate and create an amorous image in the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow. Are not these the places of religion, the rewards of continence, the self-enjoyings of self-denial? Why dost thou seek religion? Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?

Beauty | Love | Beauty |

William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen

I am prepared to place 30 years of public service on the line to say the only factor that was important in this decision is what was in the American people's best interest. There were no other factors.

World |

Wilhelm Reich

You are Great, Little Man, when you are not small and petty. You are great when you carry on your trade lovingly, when you enjoy carving and building and painting and decorating and sowing, when you enjoy the blue sky and the deer and the dew and music and dancing, your growing children and the beautiful body of your woman or your man, when you learn to understand and think about life.

Better | Important | Little | Man | Sense |

Wilhelm Röepke

A simultaneous change of our whole economic and social system in favor of drastic decentralization of cities and indus­tries, of the resto­ration of some more `natural order', more rural, but less urbanized, mecha­nized, indus­trialized, proleta­rized and commer­cialized. People will not like to face competition unless they have some firm stand. They must not feel lost in this present dehumanized world. Competition is a necessary social arrangement not a social gospel likely to make us enthusi­astic. It is a nega­tive concept which derives its strength from the fact that we like the alterna­tives, i.e., monop­oly and collectiv­ism, even less. It must be supple­mented by some­thing which is humanly positive.

Business | Debt | Man | Nature | Need | Problems | Worry | Business |

Walter Mondale, fully Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale

We were marginalized in the public eye as a presidential party. What Clinton did is an enormous accomplishment. I myself even wondered if we'd do it again.

Problems | Terrorism |

Wendell Berry

One of the attractions of moving away into te life of employment, I think, is being disconnected and free, unbothered by membership. It is a life of beginnings without memories, but i is a life too that ends without being remembered.

Terror | World |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The working class cannot play its world-revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this renegacy, spinelessness, subservience to opportunism and unexampled vulgarization of the theories of Marxism.

Hunger | People | Qualities | Revolution | Work |