Great Throughts Treasury

"Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"I know of no book which has been a source of brutality and sadistic conduct, both public and private, that can compare with the Bible." - Lord Paget, Sir James Paget, 1st Baronet

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower

"Live in contact with dreams, and you will get something of their charm; live in contact with facts, and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country where the facts were not brutal, and the dreams not unreal." - George Bernard Shaw

"Life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality." - John Ruskin

"Accumulation of wealth at one pole is... at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital." - Karl Marx

"When love became devotion instead of possession, marriage reached the climax of its slow ascent from brutality." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"What we hope for at the School of Dreams is the strength both to deal and to receive the axe's blow, to look straight at the face of God, which is none other than my own face, but seen naked, the face of my soul. The face of "God" is the unveiling, the staggering vision fo the construction we are, the tiny and great lies, the small nontruths we must have incessantly woven to be able to prepare our brothers' dinner and cook for our children. An unveiling that only happens by surprise, by accident, and with a brutality that shatters: under the blow of truth, the eggshell we are breaks. Right in the middle of life's path: the apocalypse; we lose a life." - Hélène Cixous

"There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more. But there is also the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against endless wars, the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination… There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color." - Howard Zinn

"It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money." - John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles

"Nature, by its very nature, is very brutal and unequal. However, Man has somehow managed to transform the nature of its brutality and inequality." - Kedar Joshi

"The boundary between true and false, and beautiful and ugly, will erode. Conscience will disappear in favor of special interest groups. Force and fraud will become the norm; might will become right, and brutality rampant. It will be a bellum omnium contra omnes, and the family will disintegrate as well. “The home will become a mere overnight parking place.”" - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"Anyone who has ever found himself, cannot lose in this world anymore." - Stefan Zweig

"There is nothing in Socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"The so-called Great Powers have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole number of small and weak nations. And the imperialist war is a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"But the country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you'll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on 'em looking out of his chamber window, on every rainy night since his death." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow." - Euripedes NULL

"But our path is laid.' 'Yes, that's so,' said Sam. 'And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before it started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually ? their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect that they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all at a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end; at least not to what folk inside a story it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into?' 'I wonder', said Frodo. 'But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in don't know. And you don't want them to." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien