Great Throughts Treasury

"Of course the children of immigrants go to school, and after a few years they become Americanized. But how about the grown-up persons, the adults? Who makes an effort to Americanize them? The labor organization. . . . We have done more to help establish somewhat of a conception of Americanism amongst the emigrants to our country than any other agency of which I know." - Samuel Gompers

"He cannot have God for his father who has not the church for his mother." - Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL

"With fingers weary and worn, with eyelids heavy and red, a woman sat in unwomanly rags plying her needle and thread,— Stitch! stitch! stitch! O men with sisters dear, O men with mothers and wives, it is not linen you’re wearing out, but human creatures’ lives! Sewing at once a double thread, a shroud as well as a shirt… O God! that bread should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap! No blessed leisure for love or hope, but only time for grief…My tears must stop, for every drop hinders needle and thread." - Thomas Hood

"Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education." - Thomas Hughes

"Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty." - Thomas Jefferson

"Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and... he [can] be restrained from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice, and held to their duties by dependence on his own will." - Thomas Jefferson

"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." - Thomas Jefferson

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no worth at all, if not perhaps, results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you will start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself." - Thomas Merton

"It is sometimes discouraging to see how small the peace movement is, and especially here in America where it is most necessary. But we have to remember that this is the usual pattern, and the Bible has led us to expect it. Spiritual work is done with disproportionately small and feeble instruments.. And now above all when everything is so utterly complex, and when people collapse under the burden of confusions and cease to think at all, it is natural that few may want to take on the burden of trying to effect something in the moral and spiritual way, in political action. Yet this is precisely what has to be done." - Thomas Merton

"People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all. They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men. They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are ‘members one of another.’" - Thomas Merton

"It is of the utmost danger to society to make it (religion) a party in political disputes." - Thomas Paine

"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity." - Thomas Paine

"These repeated forgeries and falsifications create a well-founded suspicion that all the cases spoken of concerning the person called Jesus Christ are made cases, on purpose to lug in, and that very clumsily, some broken sentences from the Old Testament." - Thomas Paine

"An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it you are unhappy, if you accept it you are undone." - Walter Savage Landor

"But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue… Shake one, and it awakens; then apply its polished lips to your attentive ear, and it remembers its august abodes, and murmurs as the ocean murmurs there… Past are three summers since she first beheld t The ocean; all around the child await some exclamation of amazement here: she coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased, is this the mighty ocean? is this all?" - Walter Savage Landor

"Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"With what a heavy and retarding weight does expectation load the wing of time." - William Mason

"What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"My life closed twice before its close; it yet remains to see if Immortality unveil a third event to me, so huge, so hopeless to conceive, as these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson