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

Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Alfred Schneider

Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

Character | Church | Day | God | People | Wisdom |

Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL

You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.

Care | Character | Education | Enemy | Experience | Good | Hunger | Ideas | Kill | Language | Man | Means | Men | Nations | Nothing | People | Will | Wise |

Kinza M. Hirai, fully Kinza Ringe M. Hirai

Nirvana is interpreted by Western nations as the actual annihilation of human desire or passion; but this is a mistake. Nirvana is nothing else than universal reason.

Character | Desire | Mistake | Nations | Nothing | Passion | Reason |

David Hume

It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions: the same events follow the same causes. Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit: these passions, mixed in various degrees, and distributed through society, have been from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all the actions and enterprises, which have ever been observed among mankind.

Ambition | Avarice | Beginning | Character | Events | Generosity | Human nature | Love | Mankind | Men | Motives | Nations | Nature | Principles | Public | Self | Self-love | Society | Spirit | Uniformity | World |

William Penn

Men who fight about religion have no religion to fight about, since they do in the name of religion the thin which religion itself forbids. To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious. It were better to be of no church than to be bitter in any.

Better | Character | Church | Men | Religion |

Alain Pen name of Emile-Auguste Chartier

Religion condemns religion. It is not the school that is without God, it is the Church that is without God.

Church | God | Religion | Wisdom |

Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL

They shall beat their swords into plough shares and their spears into pruning hooks; nations shall not lift up a sword against nations, neither shall they learn war any more.

Nations | War | Wisdom | Learn |

Big Elk, aka Ontopanga NULL

Do not grieve. Misfortunes will happen to the wisest and best of men. Death will come, always out of season. It is the command of the Great Spirit, and all nations and people must obey. What is past and what cannot be prevented should not be grieved for... Misfortunes do not flourish particularly in our lives - they grow everywhere.

Death | Men | Nations | Past | People | Spirit | Will | Wisdom |

Richard Cecil

The grandest operations, both in nature and in grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. The shallow brook babbles in its passage, and is heard by every one; but the coming on of the seasons is silent and unseen. The storm rages and alarms, but its fury is soon exhausted, and its effects are partial and soon remedied; but the dew, though gentle and unheard, is immense in quantity, and the very life of large portions of the earth. And these are pictures of the operations of the grace in the church and in the soul.

Church | Earth | Fury | Grace | Life | Life | Nature | Soul | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

Some political and social activities of the Catholic Church are detrimental and even dangerous for the community as a whole... [e.g.] the fight against birth control at a time when overpopulation [is] a serious obstacle to peace.

Birth | Church | Control | Peace | Time | Wisdom | Obstacle |

Albert Einstein

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

Inevitable | Nations | Power | War | Wisdom |

Abba Eban, born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

History | Men | Nations | Wisdom |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Wars can never cease so long as nations live under such widely differing conditions, so long as the value of individual life is in each nation so variously computed, and so long as the animosities which divide them represent such powerful instinctual forces in the mind.

Individual | Life | Life | Mind | Nations | Wisdom | Value |

Léon Gambetta

History is constantly repeating itself, making only such changes of programme as the growth of nations and centuries requires.

Growth | History | Nations | Wisdom |

R. B. Cunninghame Graham, fully Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham

Nothing can stand against success and yet keep fresh. Nations as well as individuals feel its vulgarizing power.

Nations | Nothing | Power | Success | Wisdom |

Rolf Hochhuth

Men may be linked by friendship. Nations are linked only by interests.

Men | Nations | Wisdom |

William Ralph Inge

The nations which have put mankind most in their debt have been small states - Israel, Athens, Florence, Elizabethan England.

Debt | Mankind | Nations | Wisdom |

Ted Kennedy, fully Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy

Based on some estimates, guns are statistically like rats. They outnumber our population. Not surprisingly, our output of ammunition for civilian firearms almost staggers the imagination. American industry outdoes all other nations in the production of bullets. Nearly 5 billion rounds of ammunition flow through the marketplace each year. that is enough, laid end to end, to stretch a bandoleer of ammunition three times around the equator. All of those bullets could not only wipe out the world’s entire human population, but they could decimate practically most of the world’s species of wildlife.

Enough | Imagination | Industry | Nations | Wisdom | World |