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

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

Church | Miracles | Power | Rest |

Sydney Cave

So long as men and women believed themselves to be responsible beings, called to choose, and accountable to God for their choices, life might be tragic, but it was not trivial.

God | Life | Life | Men | God |

Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

What is between one person and another is emptiness, nothingness, a space or field in which we can meet, talk, love, hate, hurt, nurture, encourage, and otherwise engage in ethically significant activity with one another. The between is the place wherein we are able to interact with one another, and it is a field of possibility, an opportunity as much as an emptiness to fill. Leaving the notion of emptiness to one side for the present, the betweenness of men and women works itself out in the way called “ethics,” which occasions and is the description of the consensual rules and structures of social existence.

Ethics | Existence | Hate | Love | Men | Opportunity | Present | Space |

John Cotton

Leave every church Independent; not Independent from brotherly Counsel, God forbid it that we should refuse that; but when it comes to power, that one Church shall have the power over the rest, then look for a Beast.

Church | Counsel | God | Power | Rest | God |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

It has been women who have breathed gentleness and care into the harsh progress of mankind.

Care | Gentleness | Mankind | Progress |

Felix Frankfurter

If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, “good fences make good neighbors.”

Church | Good |

Bernard Häring

If the church doesn’t listen to the world, then the world will never listen to the church.

Church | Will | World |

Françoise Giroud

Equal rights for the sexes will be achieved when mediocre women occupy high positions.

Rights | Will |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

In biblical days prophets were astir while the world was asleep; today the world is astir while church and synagogue are busy with trivialities.

Church | World |

Richard Halverson, fully Richard Christian Halverson

In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next it moved to Europe, where it became a culture, and, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.

Beginning | Church | Culture | Men | Philosophy |

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating; but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed, and restrained will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The woman is narrowed by the home, and the man is narrowed by the woman.

Man | Will | Woman |

Thomas Jefferson

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.

Children | Coercion | Men | Uniformity | World |

Laws of Manu, aka Manusmṛti, Manusmriti, Manusmruti or Mānava-Dharmaśāstra NULL

Where women are honored, there the gods delight; where they are not honored, there all acts become fruitless.

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

Sick or well, blind or seeing, bond or free, we are here for a purpose and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good life fill it. The altar is holy if only it represents the altar of our heart upon which we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded – the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcometh doubt.

Better | Church | Deeds | Doubt | Faith | God | Good | Hate | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Pious | Purpose | Purpose | Resignation | Deeds | God |

Karl Kraus

There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

John Koster

Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness.

Atheism | History | Machines | Man | Men | Need | People | Thinking | Universe | Learn | Think |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched, and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to e found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old.

Bible | Church | Civilization | Man | Soul | Bible |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

Authority | Church | Will | Zeal |

T. B. Maston, fully Thomas Buford Maston

Segregation in the church violates something that is basic in the nature of the church. How can a church exclude from “the church of God” those who are children of God? How can it, as “the body of Christ,” withhold the privilege of worship from those who have been brought into union with Christ.

Body | Children | Church | God | Nature | Worship | Privilege |

John Locke

Every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical.

Church |