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

Friedrich Engels

What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.

Doctrine | Existence | Labor | Life | Life | Proletariat | Society | Society |

Friedrich Engels

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

History |

Friedrich Engels

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

Nothing |

George Washington

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Bigotry | Conscience | Giving | Good | Government | Indulgence | Liberty | Mankind | People | Policy | Right | Toleration | Government |

Gustavo GutiƩrrez

The theory of dependence will take the wrong path and lead to deception if the analysis is not put within the framework of the worldwide class struggle

Dependence | Will | Wrong |

H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself. To work out a way to that world brain organization is therefore our primary need in this age of imperative construction.

Age | Intelligence | Need | Organization | Work | World |

Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover

Only a few rare souls in a century, to whose class I make no pretension, count much in the great flow of this Republic. The life stream of this nation is the generations of millions of human particles acting under the impulses of advancing ideas and national ideals gathered from a thousand springs... We are but transitory officials in government whose duty is to keep these channels clear and to strengthen and extend these dikes. What counts toward the honor of public officials is that they sustain the national ideals upon which are patterned the design of these channels of progress and the construction of these dikes of safety.

Design | Duty | Government | Honor | Ideals | Ideas | Life | Life | Progress | Public | Government |

Henry George

It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. I do not mean that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is still further to depress the condition of the lowest class. The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.

Happy | Improvement | Nature | Progress | Refinement | Time | Wealth |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Now, I am not opposed to organizations, but I hold that no organization can lead man to truth. Yet all religious societies, sects, and groups are based on the idea that man can be guided to truth. Organizations should exist for the welfare of man, organizations not divided by nationalities, by class distinctions.

Man | Organization |

James MacGregor Burns

A revolution is an act of violence whereby one class shatters the authority of another.

Authority | Revolution |

Jeane Kirkpatrick

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.

Doctrine | Nothing | People | Poverty | War | Wealth |

Jean-Paul Sartre

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Age | Circumstances | History |

Jean-Paul Sartre

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

Means | Society | Will | Society |

John Dewey

Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought. The more activity is restricted to a few definite lines-as it is when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences-the more action tends to become routine on the part of the class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part of the class having the materially fortunate position.

Action | Challenge | Means | Novelty | Novelty |

John Dewey

Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called individualism of the eighteenth- century enlightenment was found to involve the notion of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature. The institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual to the institution.

Education | Enlightenment | Individual | Progress | Society | Society |

John Dewey

For, as I have suggested, disruption of the unity of the self is not limited to the cases that come to physicians and institutions for treatment. They accompany every disturbance of normal relations of husband and wife, parent and child, group and group, class and class, nation and nation. Emotional responses are so total as compared with the partial nature of intellectual responses, of ideas and abstract conceptions, that their consequences are more pervasive and enduring. I can, accordingly, think of nothing of greater practical importance than the psychic effects of human relationships, normal and abnormal, should be the object of continues study, including among the consequences the indirect somatic effects.

Abstract | Consequences | Husband | Ideas | Nature | Nothing | Object | Self | Unity | Parent | Think |

John Charles Polanyi

Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the troth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color.

Karl Marx

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Force | Ideas | Time |

Karl Marx

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.