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 Paine

It is important that we should never lose sight of this distinction. We must not confuse the peoples with their governments...

Belief | Bible | God | Man | God | Bible |

Thomas Paine

For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.

Belief | Perfection | Will |

Thomas Paine

I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

Belief | Church | Creed | Equality | Hope | Mind | Power | Progress | Right | Infidelity | Happiness |

Thomas Nagel

There is a great deal of misery in the world, and many of us could easily spend our lives trying to eradicate it… One advantage of living in a world as bad as this one is that it offers the opportunity for many activities whose importance can’t be questioned. But how could the main point of human life be the elimination of evil? Misery, deprivation, and injustice prevent people from pursuing the positive goods which life is assumed to make possible. If all such goods were pointless and the only thing that really mattered was the elimination of misery, that really would be absurd.

Belief | Death | Important | Impression | People | War | Weapons | Think |

Thomas Paine

It is incumbent on every man who reverences the character of the Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial miseries, and remove the cause that has sown persecutions thick among mankind, to expel all ideas of revealed religion, as a dangerous heresy and an impious fraud.

Belief | Chastity | Lying | Man |

Thomas Paine

It will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.

Belief | Better | Cause | Excess | Men | Religion |

Thomas Paine

What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.

Belief | Bible | Woman | Bible | New Testament |

Thomas Paine

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon that the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

Belief | Bible | God | Nations | Time | God | Bible |

Thomas Paine

What more does man want to know than that the hand or power that made these things is divine, is omnipotent? Let him believe this with the force it is impossible to repel, if he permits his reason to act, and his rule of moral life will follow of course.

Belief | Woman | New Testament |

Thomas Paine

When all other rights are taken away, the right of rebellion is made perfect.

Belief | Chastity | Man | Mind |

Timothy Sprigge, fully Timothy L.S. Sprigge

It is an objective fact whether a certain experience is pleasurable or unpleasurable, and relatedly whether a particular conscious individual is presently experiencing something pleasurable or painful. It is an objective fact, so we may put it, about a subjective state.

Belief | Reflection | World | Think |

Thomas Reid

Every man is conscious of a power to determine in things which he conceives to depend upon his determination. To this power we give the name of will.

Belief | Existence | Man | Perception | Reason |

Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow

The Jews did one other seemingly contradictory thing. They individualized religion; they made it very real and personal. And yet at the same time they universalized religion! They proclaimed the moral world-rule of one God. All this, perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of religion, was the work of a mere handful of people in a tiny, obscure country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. And all of this was the heritage or the backg

Belief | Daring | Genius | God | History | Means | People | Religion | World | God | Child | Think |

W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester

Man was meant to be a gardener, but by reason of his sin he became a farmer.

Belief | Regard | Truth |

William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen

The more reliant we become upon computers and information systems, the more vulnerable we become to cyber-terrorists who will conceive unlimited ways to cripple our infrastructure, our power grids, our banking systems, our financial markets, our space based communications systems.

Administration | Belief | Challenge | Effort | Evidence | Intelligence | Kill | War | Think |

William Cobbett

The power which money gives is that of brute force; it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet.

Belief | Care | Faith |

Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.

Belief | God | History | Nature | God |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

No animal in the world gets quite as hungry as a Democrat. He would rather make a speech than a dollar.

Belief | Mind | Will |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

There is no credit to being a comedian, when you have the whole Government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts. I dont even have to exaggerate.

Argument | Belief | Consideration | Man | World |