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

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

They are distorted, deformed, hideous mentally and morally. Their trade is treason, their breath is pollution and yet the officials of the C.B.&Q. formed a conspiracy with these professional liars, perjurers, cut-throats and murderers to overcome a strike, the result of a policy of flagrant injustice.

Duty | Government | Talking | Time | War | Government |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the higher altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for the freedom not only to conform but to consume.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.

Lesson | Right | Thought | Thought |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

As a rule hogs are only raised where they have good health and grow fat. Any old place will do to raise human beings.

Capitalism | Cause | Destroy | Duty | Good | Power | Time | Traitor | Treason | World | Worry |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

Labor | Land | Present | Right | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

Battle | Criticism | Day | Life | Life | Literature | Nothing | Order | Present | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

Future | Nothing | Novels | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Justify | Order | War | Will |

Eustace Budgell

But what has been often urged as a consideration of much more weight, is not only the opinion of the better sort, but the general consent of mankind to this great truth; which I think could not possibly have come to pass, but from one of the three following reasons: either that the idea of a God is innate and co-existent with the mind itself; or that this truth is so very obvious that it is discovered by the first exertion of reason in persons of the most ordinary capacities; or, lastly, that it has been delivered down to us through all ages by a tradition from the first man. The Atheists are equally confounded, to whichever of these three causes we assign it.

Better | Desire | Good | Impression | Order | Time | Will | Words |

Eugenio Montale

In the most glorious days of the art, the artists... expressed themselves by imitating the great artists of the past, and were imitating themselves. A masterpiece was an ' imitation unsuccessful.

Art | Reality | Art |

Euripedes NULL

Do we, holding that gods exist, deceive ourselves with unsubstantiated dreams, and lies, while random careless chance and change alone rule the world?

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Sadness |

Evelyn Underhill

Love... makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.

Means | Present |

Evelyn Underhill

Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

Day | Present | Will | Value |

Evelyn Underhill

As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. I come to seek God because I need Him, may be an adequate formula for prayer. I come to adore His splendor, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet, is the only possible formula for worship.

Meaning | Purity | Reality | Strength | World |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

At the door of the dining-room he left us. 'Good night, Mr Jorkins,' he said. 'I hope you will pay us another visit when you next cross the herring pond.' 'I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think I was American.' 'He's rather odd at times.

Enough | Happy | Ugly | Old |

Evelyn Underhill

When you let intuition have its way with you, you open up new levels of the world. Such opening-up is the most practical of all activities.

Charity | Desire | Events | God | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Reality | God |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to "a semi-official statement"; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as "a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of "well-informed circles.

Emotions |

Evelyn Underhill

Adoration is caring for God above all else.

Life | Life | Reality | Sense |