Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Land

"It is indifference which is the cause of most of our unhappiness. Indifference to religion, to the happiness of others, and to the precious gift of freedom, and the wide liberty that is the inheritance of all in a free land. Are we our "Brother's Keeper"? We certainly are! If we had no regard for others' feelings or fortune, we would grow cold and indifferent to life itself. Bound up with selfishness, we could not hope for the success that could easily be ours." - George Matthew Adams

"I have been a stranger in a strange land." -

"My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon and cultivate as far as necessary for their subsistence, and so long as they occupy and cultivate it they have the right to the soil, but if they voluntarily leave it then any other people have a right to settle on it. Nothing can be sold, except things that can be carried away." - Black Hawk, born Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak NULL

"A man without religion or spiritual vision is like a captain who finds himself in the midst of an uncharted sea, without compass, rudder and steering wheel. He never knows where he is, which way he is going and where he is going to land." - William J. H. Boetcker, fully William John Henry Boetcker

"The grand difficulty is to feel the reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due place in our thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind’s eye and our heart’s eye ever fixed on the land of promise, without looking away from the road along which we are to travel toward it." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

"No public man can be a little crooked. There is no such thing as a no-man's-land between honesty and dishonesty." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover

"The only thing of value in a man is the soul. That is why it is the soul that is given everlasting life, either in the Land of the Sky or in the Underworld. The soul is man’s greatest power; it is the soul that makes us human, but how it does so we do not know. Our flesh and blood, our body, is nothing but an envelope about our vital power." - Ikinilik NULL

"A man’s Self is the sum-total of all that he can call his, not only his body, and his psychic powers, but this clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his land and horse and yacht and bank account." - William James

"Conservation is a state of harmony between man and land." - George Leonard, fully George Burr Leonard

"We have come to accept with enthusiasm the unprofessional, unappreciative, unskilled butchery of the land that goes under the name of planning." - William L. Pereira

"The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be." - O. Carl Simonton

"Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions. We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war, or industry. A moment’s rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference." - Ida Tarbell, fully Ida Minerva Tarbell

"A land ethic for tomorrow should be as honest as Thoreau's Walden, and as comprehensive as the sensitive science of ecology. It should stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life. If, in our haste to "progress," the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

"If you want inner peace find it in solitude... and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

"The noblest contribution which any man can make for the benefit of posterity, is that of character. The richest bequest which any man can leave to the youth of his native land, is that of a shining, spotless example." - Robert C. Winthrop,fully Robert Charles Winthrop

"I think the enemy is here before us... I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed... I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our home land." - Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe

"There are pauses amidst study, and even pauses of seeming idleness, in which a process goes on which may be likened to the digestion of food. In those seasons of repose, the powers are gathering their strength for new efforts; as land which lies fallow recovers itself for tillage." - James Waddel Alexander

"Let every man divide his money into three parts, and invest a third in land, a third in business, and a third let him keep in reserve." - Babylonian Talmud

"Freedom is not free. Shaping and preserving society necessarily involves personal commitment, costly risk and constant effort; the cultivation of civil liberty can be no more passive than the cultivation of a farm. A man can inherit the land on which he lives, he can even inherit the first crop of produce after he takes over from those who came before him. But then if he stops, everything stops, and begins to crumble. Nothing grows, nothing ripe and rewarding comes to him, unless he plows, plants and tends the soil and unless he keeps it fertile year after year with the chemistry of effort and forethought." - Edmond Cahn, fully Edmond Nathaniel Cahn

"A great lie is like a great fish on dry land; it may fret and fling, and make a frightful bother, but it cannot hurt you. You have only to keep still and it will die of itself." - George Crabbe

"Where Indian People had had a reverence for the productiveness of the land, whites wanted to make the land support their way of life whether it was suited to do so or not." -

"Here below is not the land of happiness; I know it now; it is only the land of toil, and every joy which comes to us is only to strengthen us for some greater labor that is to succeed." -

"Here below is not the land of happiness; it is only the land of toil; and every joy which comes to us is only to strengthen us for some greater labor that is to succeed." -

"The bare, uncompromising face of the land is too much for us to behold, and so we clothe it in myth, sentiment, and imposed expectations." - Robert Finch

"The farther we get away from the land, the greater our insecurity." - Henry Ford

"It is impossible to conceive any contrast more entire and absolute than that which exists between a heart glowing with love to God, and a heart in which the love of money has cashiered all sense of God - His love, His presence, His glory; and which is no sooner relieved from the mockery of a tedious round of religious formalism than it reverts to the sanctuaries where its wealth is invested, with an intenseness of homage surpassing that of the most devout Israelite who ever, from a foreign land, turned his longing eyes toward Jerusalem." - Richard Fuller

"The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and other have no right." - Henry George

"Reality surpasses imagination; and we see, breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of sleep." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier." - Victor Hugo

"Some of our chiefs make the claim that the land belongs to us. It is not what the Great Spirit told me. He told me that the lands belong to Him, that no people owns the land; that AI was not to forget to tell this to the white people when I met them in council." - Kanekuk NULL

"If we care about the land, it will be necessary to redefine whole economies, not just the farm economy. A complex, solid economy could certainly grow around a policy of cooperation with natural environments. Why haven’t we proposed such policies - on a grand a scale as national defense - when our own species is at stake?" - Janet Kauffman

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." - Aldo Leopold

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land." - Aldo Leopold

"The uprooting of human beings from the land, the concentration in cities, the breakdown of the authority of family, of tradition, and of moral conventions, the complexity and the novelty of modern life, and finally the economic insecurity of our industrial system have called into being the modern social worker. They perform a function in modern society which is not a luxury but an absolute necessity." - Walter Lippmann

"It is labor... which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything." - John Locke

"The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life." - Barry Lopez, fully Barry Holstun Lopez

"He who would be the tongue of this wide land must string his harp with chords of study iron and strike it with a toil-imbrowned hand." - James Russell Lowell

"Farmers now are members of a capital-intensive industry that values good bookwork more than backwork. so several times a year almost every farmer must seek operating credit from the college fellow in the white shirt and tie - in effect, asking financial permission to work hard on his own land." - Andrew H Malcolm

"The institutions of a country depend in great measure on the nature of its soil and situation. Many of the wants of man are awakened or supplied by these circumstances. To these wants, manners, laws, and religion must shape and accommodate themselves. The division of land, and the rights attached to it, alter with the soil; the laws relating to its produce, with its fertility. The manners of its inhabitants are in various ways modified by its position. The religion of a miner is not the same as the faith of a shepherd, nor is the character of the ploughman so war-like as that of the hunter. The observant legislator follows the direction of all these various circumstances. the knowledge of the natural advantages or defects of a country thus form an essential part of political science and history." - Justus Möser

"The human mind is the richest unexplored area of the world. The mind, like land, does not care what we plant. Good or bad, it returns what is planted." - Richard R. Pharr

"As land is improved by sowing it with various seeds so is the mind by exercising it with different studies." - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL

"Bound only by birth and death, life is both the ultimate mystery and the process of solving it. Life is a dance, a leap into the unknown. After you jump and before you land, is God. God is ecstasy: that state of being when everything comes together, nothing is missing, and it’s all vibrating and electric. Life is an excuse for ecstasy." - Gabrielle Roth

"We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy - and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers’ graves, and his children’s birthright is forgotten." -

"The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the Native American shared this elemental ethic: the land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

"Today the conservation movement finds itself turning back to ancient Indian land ideas, to the Indian understanding that we are not outside of nature, but of it... In recent decades we have slowly come back to some of the truths that the Indian knew from the beginning; that unborn generations have a claim on the land equal to our own; that men need to keep an ear to the earth, and to replenish their spirits in frequent contacts with animals and wild land." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

"Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"The young men of this land are called a "lost" race - they are a race that has never yet been discovered. And the whole secret, power, and knowledge of their own discovery is locked within them - they know it, feel it, have the whole thing in them - and they cannot utter it." - Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe

"Personal growth is often the result not of doing something new, but of seeing the same things in a new light. We all have mental maps of our world that we mistake for the actual territory. By clinging on to old maps we fail to see the true lie of the land and get lost." - Tom Butler-Bowdon

"We do not inherit this land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." -