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

Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie

It was because it was easier to blame me, ... You know, 'Why is he rocking the boat?' In those days there was a lot of that stuff. He was asking for it. He did it on purpose. He was begging for it. It was just conventional blaming-the-victim stuff. I don't like the term 'victim' when applied to myself. Certainly I felt the guilt burden had shifted from the people doing the violence to the person on the receiving end of the violence.

Chance | Childhood | Experience | Meaning | Past | People | Present | Sense | Loss | Old |

Samuel Gompers

The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day.

Apology | Better | Desire | Enough | Little | Man | Means | Men | People | Reading | Time | Will |

Thomas Carlyle

That great mystery of Time, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,--for we have no word to speak about it.

Nature |

Thomas Jefferson

I readily suppose my opinion wrong, when opposed by the majority.

Truths |

Thomas Jefferson

I never saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many, on their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another.

Thomas Jefferson

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.

Better | Fear | Looks | Man | Melancholy | Mind | Nothing | Opinion | Principles | Sound | Suppression | Truth | Will | Learn |

William Cobbett

But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, the metropolis of the empire?

Wilhelm Reich

I was accused of being a utopian, of wanting to eliminate the displeasure of the world and defend just pleasure. However, I have stated clearly that the traditional education makes people unable to pleasure encouraçando them against unpleasure. Pleasure and joy of living are inconceivable without struggle, painful experiences and unpleasant encounters with himself. The psychic health is not characterized by the theory of nirvana of yogis and Buddhists, nor the hedonism of the Epicureans nor the monastic renunciation; characterized, rather, by alternating between fighting unpleasant and happiness, truth and error, the deviation and correction of the route, anger rational and rational love, in short, to be fully alive in all situations of life. The ability to withstand pain and displeasure without becoming embittered and without escaping the rigidity, goes hand in hand with the ability to accept and give love happiness.

Choice | Think |

Walter Lippmann

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Bible | People | Bible |

Walter Lippmann

For the principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed.

Bible | People | Bible |

Walker Percy

Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?

Chance | Day | Wife | Woman |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

A party is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the masses.

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

As happens in dreams, when a perfectly harmless object inspires us with fear and thereafter is frightening every time we dream of it (and even in real life retains disquieting overtones), so Dreyer's presence became for Franz a refined torture, an implacable menace. [ ... H]e could not help cringing when, with a banging of doors in a dramatic draft, Martha and Dreyer entered simultaneously from two different rooms as if on a too harshly lit stage. Then he snapped to attention and in this attitude felt himself ascending through the ceiling, through the roof, into the black-brown sky, while, in reality, drained and empty, he was shaking hands with Martha, with Dreyer. He dropped back on his feet out of that dark nonexistence, from those unknown and rather silly heights, to land firmly in the middle of the room (safe, safe!) when hearty Dreyer described a circle with his index finger and jabbed him in the navel; Franz mimicked a gasp and giggled; and as usual Martha was coldly radiant. His fear did not pass but only subsided temporarily: one incautious glance, one eloquent smile, and all would be revealed, and a disaster beyond imagination would shatter his career. Thereafter whenever he entered this house, he imagined that the disaster had happened—that Martha had been found out, or had confessed everything in a fit of insanity or religious self-immolation to her husband; and the drawing room chandelier invariably met him with a sinister refulgence.

Inspiration | Story |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

Betrayal | Consciousness | Familiarity | Force | Fraternity | Life | Life | Order | People | Torture | Parting |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging — witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns — what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it — thought and imagination — are of no importance whatsoever?

Day | Nature | Past | Speech | Time | World |

Václav Havel

Modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy — that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.

Knowing | People | Reading | Will |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

The fact that no two major countries have done to war since they both got McDonald’s is partly due to economic integration, but it is also due to the presence of American power and America’s willingness to use that power against those who would threaten the system of globalization–from Iraq to North Korea. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.[...] McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer dollars.

Age | Important | Influence | Parents | Principles | Thinking | Time | Woman | Teacher |

Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.

Universe |

Drew Curtis

Readers assume information carried by Mass Media is true solely because it appears there. While Mass Media asks its audience to treat all media matters with a degree of skepticism, no one actually does. People expect Mass Media to do that for them, but it doesn’t. Whether it should is another issue entirely.

Money | News | People | Statistics |