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

Herbert Gold

The steady pressure to consume, absorb, participate, receive, by eye, ear, mouth and mail involves a cruelty to intestines, blood pressure, and psyche unparalleled in history. We are being killed with kindness. We are being stifled with culture and material joys.

Cruelty | Culture | History | Kindness | Receive | Wisdom | Cruelty |

Sandra G. Harding

Central to the notion of masculinity is its rejection of everything that is defined by a culture as feminine and its legitimated control of whatever counts as the feminine... Gender is an asymmetrical category of human thought, social organization, and individual identity and behavior.

Behavior | Control | Culture | Individual | Organization | Thought | Wisdom |

S. I. Hayakawa, fully Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture than you are a victim of it.

Culture | Wisdom | Victim |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The patriotism of antiquity becomes in modern societies a caricature. In antiquity, it developed naturally from the whole condition of a people, its youth, its situation, its culture - with us it is an awkward imitation. Our life demands, not separation from other nations, but constant intercourse; our city life is not that of the ancient city-state.

Antiquity | Culture | Imitation | Life | Life | Nations | Patriotism | People | Wisdom | Youth |

George Mogridge, aka "Old Humphrey"

How can man be intelligent, happy, or useful, without the culture and discipline of education? It is this that unlocks the prison-house of his mind, and releases the captive.

Culture | Discipline | Education | Happy | Man | Mind | Prison | Wisdom |

Thomas Hobbes

Whatever therefore is consequent to a tie of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such a condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Culture | Danger | Death | Earth | Enemy | Fear | Force | Industry | Invention | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Men | Security | Society | Strength | Time | War | Wisdom | Danger |

Jamake Highwater

It is possible... for a culture to be overwhelmed physically but not culturally.

Culture | Wisdom |

William James

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains - under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

Culture | Wisdom |

Robert A. Johnson

A myth is a collective 'dream' of an entire people at a certain point in their history... But a myth not only lives in literature and imagination, it immediately finds its way into the behavior and attitudes of the culture - into the practical daily lives of the people.

Behavior | Culture | History | Imagination | Literature | Myth | People | Wisdom |

Jeane Kirkpatrick

All of us confronts limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization. We are bound by the culture we have in common, that culture which distinguishes us from other people in other times. Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.

Body | Civilization | Culture | People | Time | Wisdom |

Padee Moothoo

I think life is to do something for other tribesmen, save the culture and keep the circle going. And we must honor the separateness of each culture, tribe and language.

Culture | Honor | Language | Life | Life | Wisdom | Think |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’s brain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearances.

Contrast | Culture | Eternal | Impossibility | Man | Nature | Poetry | Reality | Reason | Truth | Wisdom | World |

Cynthia Ozick

Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

Abuse | Culture | Language | Wisdom | Words |

Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

Culture | Ideas | Knowledge | Nature | Order | Past | Society | Will | Wisdom | World | Society |

Behavior Research Project NULL

People in our culture have a morbid tendency to avoid blame, because they do not wish to take the trouble to change their conduct in any way: blame-avoidance and blame-transference are therefore endemic amongst us. These are substitutes for repentance and renewal.

Blame | Change | Conduct | Culture | People | Repentance | Trouble |

Robert Andrews

Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the tribe passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations.

Books | Culture | Model | Posterity | Quotations | Wisdom |

Julian Baggini

Perhaps the biggest danger is the way a culture of self-help fosters both feelings of inadequacy and hopes for unattainable ideals… foolproof prescriptions for fulfillment and meaningful lives. The futile quest to become a complete all-round wonderful person, fully in control of our health, wealth and happiness.

Control | Culture | Danger | Feelings | Fulfillment | Health | Ideals | Self | Wealth | Danger |

George Frederick Will

Men and women are biological facts. Ladies and gentleman - citizens - are social artifacts, works of political art. They carry the culture that is sustained by wise laws, and traditions of civility. A the end of the day we are right to judge a society by the character of the people it produces. That is why statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft.

Art | Character | Civility | Culture | Day | Men | People | Right | Society | Wisdom | Wise | Society |

Tom Butler-Bowdon

To lead, you have to make a declaration of independence against the estimation of others, the culture, the age. You have to decide to live in the world, but outside existing conceptions of it. Leaders do not merely do well by the terms of their culture they create new contexts, new things, new ways of doing and being.

Age | Culture | Estimation | World |