Great Throughts Treasury

"There is what I call the American idea. I so name it, because it seems to me to lie at the basis of all our truly original, distinctive, and American institutions. It is itself a complex idea, composed of three subordinate and more simple ideas, namely: The idea that all men have unalienable rights; that in respect thereof, all men are created equal; and that government is to be established and sustained for the purpose of giving every man an opportunity for the enjoyment and development of all these unalienable rights. This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." - Theodore Parker

"Four features of a good speech: 1. Clarity – achieved if you have a good outline. 2. Charity – praise the audience. 3. Brevity – JFK believed anything worth saying can be covered in a 20 minute speech. 4. Levity – as evidenced by Kennedy’s ironic wit." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen

"Among the wise and high-minded people who in self-respecting and genuine fashion strive earnestly for peace, there are the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a movement and always discrediting it — the men who form the lunatic fringe in all reform movements." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny." - Thomas Carlyle

"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

"Do not be too severe upon the errors of the people, but reclaim them by enlightening them." - Thomas Jefferson

"For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security." - Thomas Jefferson

"I see the necessity of sacrificing our opinions sometimes to the opinions of others for the sake of harmony." - Thomas Jefferson

"Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man." - Thomas Jefferson

"We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves." - Thomas Jefferson

"That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again — these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things a he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence." - Thomas Merton

"Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis." - Thomas Merton

"Humility contains in itself the answer to all the great problems of the life of the soul. It is the only key to faith, with which the spiritual life begins: for faith and humility are inseparable." - Thomas Merton

"Life consists in learning to live on one’s own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one’s own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." - Thomas Merton

"Now one of the things we must cast out first of all is fear. Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves. If we were terrified of God as an inexorable judge, we would not confidently await His mercy, or approach Him trustfully in prayer." - Thomas Merton

"Love's Secret - Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind doth move Silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart, Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears. Ah! she did depart! Soon after she was gone from me, A traveler came by, Silently, invisibly: He took her with a sigh." - William Blake

"Songs of Innocence (Introduction) - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped; he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’ So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear." - William Blake

"Love-Contradictions - As rare to heare as seldome to be seene, It cannot be nor never yet hathe bene That fire should burne with perfecte heate and flame Without some matter for to yealde the same. A straunger case yet true by profe I knowe A man in joy that livethe still in woe: A harder happ who hathe his love at lyste Yet lives in love as he all love had miste: Whoe hathe enougehe, yet thinkes he lives wthout, Lackinge no love yet still he standes in doubte. What discontente to live in suche desyre, To have his will yet ever to requyre." - Edward Dyer, fully Sir Edward Dyer

"Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine

"The sum of the knowable, that soil which the human spirit must till, lies between all the languages and independent of them, at their center. But man cannot approach this purely objective realm other than through his own modes of cognition and feeling, in other words: subjectively. Just where study and research touch the highest and deepest point, just there does the mechanical, logical use of reason - whatever in us can most easily be separated from our uniqueness as individual human beings - find itself at the end of its rope. From here on we need a process of inner perception and creation. And all that we can plainly know about this is its result, namely, that objective truth always rises from the entire energy of subjective individuality." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"When there's a rash thing to be done by a man and a woman together, sir, philosophers have remarked that it's always the woman who leads the way." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"Work democracy does not wish to prevent or prohibit anything. Its only intention is the fulfilment of the biological life functions, of love, work and knowledge." - Wilhelm Reich

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function." - Walter Lippmann

"A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting." - Walter Lippmann

"Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions... are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends." - Walter Lippmann

"In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others however humble." - Washington Irving

"There is certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place." - Washington Irving

"There is certainly something in angling that tends to produce a serenity of the mind." - Washington Irving

"Every fall that you take is a gift, and every relapse is a glorious opportunity — after all, without them you can’t manifest the energy to get to a higher place." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do." - Wendell Berry

"There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to serious literature (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: great books). I am not sincere, I am not provocative, I am not satirical. I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of thaw in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my Invitation to a Beheading - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"It is new fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The composition of a tragedy requires testicles." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"We must go to the roots of the problem, to the core of the human psyche, recognizing that collective social action begins with action in individual life. We cannot separate the individual and the society. We each contain the society when we accept the value structure of society, when we accept the priorities worked out for us by governments and the states and the political parties. We are expressions of the collective, repeating the pattern created for us, and we feel happy because we are given physical security, economic security, comfort, leisure, entertainment. We have been trained to be obsessed with the idea of security; the idea of tomorrow haunts us much more than the responsibility for today." - Vimala Thakar

"He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence." - Vera Mary Brittain

"Thus all things are doomed to change for the worse and retrograde." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"When we associate with others we really associate with ourselves. We like or dislike in others whatever we like or dislike in ourselves." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another on and upward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Whatever the method of worship and whichever the Name or Form, it is faith that matters; it is that which gives life and energy for higher things." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Women should perform their duties well and give due importance to their appearances because only then they will be able to attract good husbands." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"We will not abandon property that we feel can acquire." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Religion, in its purity, is not so much a pursuit as a temper; or rather it is a temper, leading to the pursuit of all that is high and holy. Its foundation is faith; its action, works; its temper, holiness; its aim, obedience to God in improvement of self and benevolence to men." - Tryon Edwards

"A scholar should gather up spirit and energy in single-mindedness. If your quest for virtue is for reasons of fame and fortune, you will never amount to anything. If in scholarly endeavors you indulge in fashionable verse and stylistic flourishes, you cannot attain depth and stability of mind." - Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming