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

Hannah Arendt

Today we ought to add to these terms the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureau in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.

Hannah Arendt

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Man |

Hannah Arendt

This shows to what extent violence and its arbitrariness were taken for granted and therefore neglected; no one questions or examines what is obvious to all.

Man |

Hans Reichenbach

Carnap calls such concepts as point, straight line, etc., which are given by implicit definitions, improper concepts. Their peculiarity rests on the fact that they do not characterize a thing by its properties, but by its relation to other things. Consider for example the concept of the last car of a train. Whether or not a particular car falls under this description does not depend on its properties but on its position relative to other cars. We could therefore speak of relative concepts, but would have to extend the meaning of this term to apply not only to relations but also to the elements of the relations.

Hannah Arendt

To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.

Man |

Hans Reichenbach

Clocks are inherently four-dimensional instruments, since the endpoints of their unit distances are events. Measuring rods, on the other hand, are three-dimensional measuring instruments; their end points are space points and they can be changed into four-dimensional measuring instruments only if events are produced at their end points according to a special rule.

Hannah Arendt

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

Good | Man | Wife |

Hans Reichenbach

Absolute time would exist in a causal structure for which the concept indeterminate as to time order lends to a unique simultaneity, i.e., for which there is no finite interval of time between the departure and return of a first-signal...

Hans Reichenbach

Common to the two geometries is only the general property of one-to-one correspondence, and the rule that this correspondence determines straight lines as shortest lines as well as their relations of intersection.

Hans Zinnser

We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically ? as Amy Lowell loved Keats ? and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span ? in their protoplasmic continuities ? the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men.

Devil | Man |

Hans Reichenbach

We are frequently faced with the necessity of looking for the picture required for the visualization of an object, not in the perception of this particular object, but in a different perceptual image... we can assert the discrepancy between the perceived picture and the objective state. This discrepancy... proves absolutely nothing against the fact that all visualizations are merely sense qualities of the perceptual space... If the parallelism is... to be visualized, we must supplement our assertion by the description of certain qualities with which we are familiar from perceptual space.

Little | Man |

Italian Proverbs

One may buy gold too dear.

Faith |

Italian Proverbs

Sometimes the lees are better than the wine.

Little | Means | Will |

Italian Proverbs

Nothing improves the taste of pasta more than a good appetite.

Control | People |

Italian Proverbs

Of this world each man has as much as he takes.

Life | Life | Men |

Italian Proverbs

The father a saint the son a devil.

Culture | Means |

Italian Proverbs

Of what does not concern you say nothing, good or bad.

Consideration | Man | Nothing |

Italian Proverbs

One good morsel and a hundred vexations.

Mind | Need | People |

Italian Proverbs

None so deaf as those who will not hear.

Beauty | Gloom | Humanity | Power | Soul | Spirit | Will | Beauty |

Italian Proverbs

The buyer has need of a hundred eyes, the seller of but one.

Design |