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

Sydney Smith

If idleness do not produce vice or malevolence, it commonly produces melancholy.

Character | Idleness | Melancholy | Vice |

Publilius Clodius Thrasea Paetus (sometimes inverted Paetus Thrasea)

He who hates vice hates men. [hate [moral] failings and you hate people]

Character | Hate | Men | Wisdom | Vice |

Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff

There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.

Avarice | Character | Mankind | Vice |

Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.

Character | Folly | Skill | Vice |

Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

I know no evil so great as the abuse of the understanding, and yet there is no one vice more common.

Abuse | Character | Evil | Understanding | Vice |

William Graham Sumner

The four great motives which move men to social activity are hunger, love, vanity, and fear of superior powers. If we search out the causes which have moved men to war we find them under each of these motives or interests.

Character | Fear | Hunger | Love | Men | Motives | Search | War |

John H. Aughey, fully John Hill Aughey

Debt is the secret foe of thrift, as vice and idleness are its open enemies.

Debt | Idleness | Thrift | Wisdom | Vice |

Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.

Character | Instinct | Motives | Self | Self-preservation |

Franklin Pierce Adams, pen name F.P.A.

When the political columnists say "Every thinking man" they mean themselves, and when the candidates appeal to "Every intelligent vote" they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Man | Thinking | Wisdom |

James Q. Wilson

To say that people have a moral sense is not the same thing as saying that they are innately good. A moral sense must compete with other senses that are natural to humans - the desire to survive, acquire possessions, indulge in sex, or accumulate power - in short, with self-interest narrowly defined. How that struggle is resolved will differ depending on our character, our circumstances, and the cultural and political tendencies of the day. But saying that a moral sense exists is the same thing as saying that humans, by their nature, are potentially good.

Character | Circumstances | Day | Desire | Good | Nature | People | Possessions | Power | Self | Self-interest | Sense | Struggle | Will |

John Arbuthnot

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Wisdom |

Carleton Washburne

In our thinking we must preserve an open and enquiring mind, an ability to see things through the eyes of our opponents, a skill for understanding the motives and thoughts of those whom we oppose. Yet we must act in the light of the best knowledge and reason available to us at the moment.

Ability | Character | Knowledge | Light | Mind | Motives | Reason | Skill | Thinking | Understanding | Wisdom |

Harry Weinberger

The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. If the Government or majorities think an individual is right, no one will interfere with him; but when agitators talk against the things considered holy, or when radicals criticise, or satirize the political gods, or question the justice of our laws and institutions, or pacifists talk against war, how the old inquisition awakens, and ostracism, the excommunication of the church, the prison, the wheel, the torture-chamber, the mob, are called to suppress the free expression of thought.

Character | Government | Individual | Justice | Question | Right | Will | Wisdom | World | Wrong | Government | Old | Think |

Ralph Venning

Virtue and vice are both prophets; the first, of certain good; the second, of pain or else of penitence.

Character | Good | Pain | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |

William L. Abbott

Develop the art of friendliness. One can experience a variety of emotions staying home and reading or watching television; one will be alive but hardly living. Most of the meaningful aspects of life are closely associated with people. Even the dictionary definition of life involves people.

Art | Emotions | Experience | Life | Life | People | Reading | Television | Will | Wisdom | Art |