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

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

The paradox of the British: the weak who wangled the earth and were cursed for it and by it.

Ezra Taft Benson

A child needs a mother more than all the things money can buy. Spending time with your children is the greatest gift of all.

Argument | Authority | Danger | Force | Good | Government | Grave | Growth | History | Hope | Individual | Little | People | Power | Right | Time | Will | Government | Danger |

Ezra Taft Benson

In recognizing God as the source of their rights, the Founding Fathers declared Him to be the ultimate authority for their basis of law. This led them to the conviction that people do not make law but merely acknowledge preexisting law, giving it specific application. The Constitution was conceived to be such an expression of higher law. And when their work was done, James Madison wrote: “It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution” (The Federalist, no. 37).

Control | Government | Initiative | Means | Order | People | Power | Restraint | System | Government |

Faye Wattleton

Our strength lies in the fact that we are supported by the majority of Americans. And our motivation lies in our obligation to make sure their voices are heard and acknowledged by those who set public policy in this country.

Society | Society |

Felix Adler

The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life is as real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must be anointed so that we may see it.

Diversity | Enough | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Individual | Nothing | Receive | Religion | Respect | Right | Sacred | Thought | Will | Respect | Thought |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.

Suicide | Thought | Thought |

Felix Adler

Ethical religion affirms the continuity of progress toward moral perfection. It affirms that the spiritual development of the human race cannot be prematurely cut off, either gradually or suddenly; that every stone of offence against which we stumble is a stepping-stone to some greater good ; that, at the end of days, if we choose to put it so, or, rather, in some sphere beyond the world of space and time, all the rays of progress will be summed and centred in a transcendent focus.

Convictions | Man |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Friend | Nothing |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

Abstract | Magic | Mind | Will |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

Business | Men | Business |

Fannie Hurst

Few enjoy noisy overcrowded functions. But they are a gesture of goodwill on the part of host or hostess, and also on the part of guests who submit to them.

Worth |

Ezra Taft Benson

Today the devil as a wolf in supposedly a new suit of sheepÂ’s clothing is enticing some men to parrot his line by advocating planned government guaranteed security at the expense of our liberties.

Life | Life | Spirit | Spirituality | Will |

Felix Adler

The family is the school of duties... founded on love.

Achievement | Eternal | Life | Life | Power | Regard | Sorrow | Strength | Unity | Weakness | Understand |

Ezra Taft Benson

In the providence of God, governments were intended to be the servants, not the masters of the people. This eternal truth needs to be emphasized and re-emphasized.

Blessings | Desire | Fear | God | Humility | Land | Memory | Need | Nothing | Problems | God |

Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Wrong |

Felix Adler

The moral order never is, but is ever becoming. It grows with our growth.

Criticism | Desire | Doubt | Faith | Improvement | Individual | Life | Life | Nations | Regard | Sacred | Intellect |

Ezra Taft Benson

If we do not accept the existence of a Supreme Being; that God is the source of moral law, what more do we have to offer than Marx?Â… Freedom is an eternal, God-given principle. There is no genuine happiness without freedom, nor is there any security or peace without freedom. After traveling in practically all of the free countries of the world and several times behind the Iron Curtain, I say that Marxism is the greatest evil in this world and the greatest threat to all we hold dear. Of all sad things in the world, the saddest is to see a people who have once known liberty and freedom and then lost it. I have seen the unquenchable yearning of the human heart for liberty on two unforgettable occasions. These experiences are indelibly etched on the memory of my soul.

Civilization | God | Honor | Meaning | Trust | God |

Ezra Taft Benson

That great and wise American, Thomas Jefferson, warned us of the danger of conferring unwarranted power upon our government administrators in these sobering words: “Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go. . . . In questions of power, then, let not more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Government | People | Philosophy | Policy | Government |

Ezra Taft Benson

With independence won, another body of men assembled; and under the inspiration of heaven, they too drafted a document, probably the greatest instrument ever struck off at a given time by the mind of man: the Constitution of the United States.

Enough | Family | Heart | Love | Mission | People |

Felix Adler

We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing religious sentiment, are dear. And on the other hand we shall be just to those who have ceased to regard them as satisfactory and dispensed with them in their own persons.

Life | Life | Present | Race | Time |