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

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We are the United States of amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Time |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.

Important | Life | Life | Object | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.

Imagination | Important | Novels | Think |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Power |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

As a rule hogs are only raised where they have good health and grow fat. Any old place will do to raise human beings.

Capitalism | Cause | Destroy | Duty | Good | Power | Time | Traitor | Treason | World | Worry |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The united vote of those who toil and have not will vanquish those who have and toil not, and solve forever the problems of democracy.

Courage | Injustice | Injustice | Intelligence | Justice | Men | Power | Right | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Wrong |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, "I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned." And I said, You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?

Price | Proletariat | Question | Right | System |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

Order | Society | Society | Govern |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

Battle | Criticism | Day | Life | Life | Literature | Nothing | Order | Present | Will |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people. That is the demand.

Control | Government | Power | Government |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Of course, Socialism is violently denounced by the capitalist press and by all the brood of subsidized contributors to magazine literature, but this only confirms the view that the advance of Socialism is very properly recognized by the capitalist class as the one cloud upon the horizon which portends an end to the system in which they have waxed fat, insolent and despotic through the exploitation of their countless wage-working slaves.

Business | Care | Earth | Knowing | Men | Question | Society | System | Society | Business | Old |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The elimination of rent, interest, profit and the production of wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people. That is the demand.

Equality | Philosophy | Principles | Race |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Justify | Order | War | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

There is no such thing as a true account of anything.

People |

Euripedes NULL

Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needs no questioning before he speaks.

Question | Will |

Euripedes NULL

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.

Man | Struggle | Will |

Eustace Budgell

But what has been often urged as a consideration of much more weight, is not only the opinion of the better sort, but the general consent of mankind to this great truth; which I think could not possibly have come to pass, but from one of the three following reasons: either that the idea of a God is innate and co-existent with the mind itself; or that this truth is so very obvious that it is discovered by the first exertion of reason in persons of the most ordinary capacities; or, lastly, that it has been delivered down to us through all ages by a tradition from the first man. The Atheists are equally confounded, to whichever of these three causes we assign it.

Better | Desire | Good | Impression | Order | Time | Will | Words |

Eustace Budgell

In short, a private education seems the most natural method for the forming of a virtuous man; a public education for making a man of business. The first would furnish out a good subject for PlatoÂ’s republic, the latter a member for a community overrun with artifice and corruption.

Education | Means | Men | Nothing | Order | Reason | Service | Temper | Think |

Eugenio Montale

You do not remember the house of the customs officers from the upward overhanging the cliff: desolate awaits you from the night when entered it the swarm of your thoughts restless and stopped there.

Men | Position | Power | Victim |

Euripedes NULL

Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom.

Children | Love | People | Virtue | Virtue |