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

Saul Bellow

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?

Art | Character | Heart | Indignation | Love | Man | People | Power | Rest | Soul | Art |

H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

Character | Indignation | Jealousy |

Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

They believe their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know very little beyond the words.

Crime | Cruelty | Deference | Devotion | Enthusiasm | Feelings | Indignation | Little | Nothing | Oppression | People | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Words |

Vittorio de Sica

Moral indignation is in most cases 2 percent moral, 48 percent indignation and 50 percent envy.

Envy | Indignation |

Frans de Waal, fully Franciscus Bernardus Maria "Frans" de Waal

It is safe to assume that the actions of our ancestors were guided by gratitude, obligation, retribution, and indignation before they developed enough language capacity for moral discourse.

Capacity | Enough | Gratitude | Indignation | Language | Obligation | Safe |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

Good | Indignation |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

Moral indignation permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

Envy | Hate | Indignation |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Indignation | Suffering |

Jean-Antoine Petit-Senn

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.

Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |

John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck

Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor, or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration.

Behavior | Indignation | Little | Man | Torture |

John Antoine Petit-Senn

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.

Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |

Leland Stanford, fully Amasa Leland Stanford

A man's sentiments are generally just and right, while it is second selfish thought which makes him trim and adopt some other view. The best reforms are worked out when sentiment operates, as it does in women, with the indignation of righteousness.

Indignation | Sentiment | Thought | Thought |

Lord Brooke, Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Brooke

I hardly know a sight that raises one's indignation more than that of an enlarged soul joined to a contracted fortune; unless it be that so much more common one, of a contracted soul joined to an enlarged fortune.

Indignation | Soul |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

An age that melts with unperceiv'd decay, And glides in modest innocence away.

Day | Indignation | Men | Rank | Will |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

A heavy progressive tax upon a very large fortune is in no way such a tax upon thrift or industry as a like would be on a small fortune. No advantage comes either to the country as a whole or to the individuals inheriting the money by permitting the transmission in their entirety of the enormous fortunes which would be affected by such a tax; and as an incident to its function of revenue raising, such a tax would help to preserve a measurable equality of opportunity for the people of the generations growing to manhood. We have not the slightest sympathy with that socialistic idea which would try to put laziness, thriftlessness and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift and efficiency; which would strive to break up not merely private property, but what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilization stands. Such a theory, if ever adopted, would mean the ruin of the entire country — a ruin which would bear heaviest upon the weakest, upon those least able to shift for themselves. But proposals for legislation such as this herein advocated are directly opposed to this class of socialistic theories. Our aim is to recognize what Lincoln pointed out: The fact that there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal; but also to insist that there should be an equality of self-respect and of mutual respect, an equality of rights before the law, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which each man obtains the chance to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows.

Contempt | Good | Indignation | Right |

Thomas Jefferson

Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.

Indignation | Pleasure |

William Blake

The pure soul shall mount on native wings . . . and cut a path into the heaven of glory.

Cause | Consequences | God | Indignation | God | Think |