Great Throughts Treasury

"Too mean-spirited and too feeble in resolve to attempt the conquest of their own evil passions, and of the difficulties of the material world, men sought dominion over their fellow-men, as an easy method to gain that apparent majesty and power which the instinct of their nature requires." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"If on the morrow of the revolution, the masses of the people have only phrases at their service, if they do not recognize, by clear and blinding facts, that the situation has been transformed to their advantage, if the overthrow ends only in a change of persons and formulae, nothing will have been achieved. ... In order that the revolution should be something more than a word, in order that the reaction should not lead us back tomorrow to the situation of yesterday, the conquest of today must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must not be the poor today." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"Men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever searching for the means to transform them into action, — men of integrity for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles, — intrepid souls who know that it is necessary to dare in order to succeed, — these are the lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arms in hand, to the conquest of their rights." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"The critics analyze the sources of law, and find there either a god, product of the terrors of the savage, and stupid, paltry, and malicious as the priests who vouch for its supernatural origin, or else, bloodshed, conquest by fire and sword. They study the characteristics of law, and instead of perpetual growth corresponding to that of the human race, they find its distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day by day." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"This [the opening of the Vatican City radio station built by Marconi earlier in 1931] was a new demonstration of the harmony between science and religion that each fresh conquest of science ever more luminously confirms, so that one may say that those who speak of the incompatibility of science and religion either make science say that which it never said or make religion say that which it never taught." - Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader." - Plato NULL

"That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it." - Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL

"This [the opening of the Vatican City radio station built by Marconi earlier in 1931] was a new demonstration of the harmony between science and religion that each fresh conquest of science ever more luminously confirms, so that one may say that those who speak of the incompatibility of science and religion either make science say that which it never said or make religion say that which it never taught." -

"I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by individual behavior, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don't think it's a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation." - Richard Dawkins

"Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end." - Simone Weil

"The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness. So the best way seems to be to scourge oneself with thin cords which hurt superficially, rather than to use some other means which might produce serious internal injury." - Ignatius Loyola, aka Saint Ignatius of Loyola

"He hath willed everything that may be for our good, if we perform the condition he hath required; and hath put it upon record, that we may know it and regulate our desires and supplications according to it. If we will not seek him, his immutability cannot be a bar, but our own folly is the cause; and by our neglect we despoil him of this perfection as to us, and either imply that he is not sincere, and means not as he speaks; or that he is as changeable as the wind, sometimes this thing, sometimes that, and not at all to be confided in. If we ask according to his revealed will, the unchangeableness of his nature will assure us of the grant; and what a presumption would it be in a creature dependent upon his sovereign, to ask that which he knows he has declared his will against; since there is no good we can want, but he hath promised to give, upon our sincere and ardent desire for it." - Stephen Charnock

"Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"There might finally emerge a human animal of rare sensitivity whose curiosity could sense the existence of environments no longer physical, where the adaption required of all the species was a subtle change of consciousness." - Theodore Roszak

"No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; — living in a vain show. Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death." - Thomas Carlyle

"There is a set of people whom I cannot bear—the pinks of fashionable propriety,—whose every word is precise, and whose every movement is unexceptionable, but who, though versed in all the categories of polite behaviour, have not a particle of soul or cordiality about them. We allow that their manners may be abundantly correct. There may be eloquence in every gesture, and gracefulness in every position; not a smile out of place, and not a step that would not bear the measurement of the severest scrutiny. This is all very fine: but what I want is the heart and gaiety of social intercourse; the frankness that spreads ease and animation around it; the eye that speaks affability to all, that chases timidity from every bosom, and tells every man in the company to be confident and happy. This is what I conceive to be the virtue of the text, and not the sickening formality of those who walk by rule, and would reduce the whole of human life to a wire-bound system of misery and constraint." - Thomas Chalmers

"The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers, and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"The greater of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the infinite goodness of God with His omnipotence." - Walter Lippmann

"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art: I warm'd both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart." - Walter Savage Landor

"If... I can by any lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sorrow; if I can now and then penetrate through the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good humor with his fellow beings and himself, surely, surely, I shall not then have written entirely in vain." - Washington Irving

"Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy." - Wendell Berry

"As if in a school for gods, we learn the consequences of thought." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"Down with this contemptible fraud! There cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be “equality” between the oppressed and the oppressors, between the exploited and the exploiters. There cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be real “freedom” as long as there is no freedom for women from the privileges which the law grants to men, as long as there is no freedom for the workers from the yoke of capital, and no freedom for the toiling peasants from the yoke of the capitalists, landlords and merchants." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!" - Victor Hugo

"The sun showers light to one and all without any discrimination. Similarly, humans should also engage himself in doing works for the benefit of the society." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Alack, our terrene moon is now eclipsed; and it portends alone the fall of Antony!" - William Shakespeare

"Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at III, ii)" - William Shakespeare

"Better it were, that all the miseries which nature owns were ours at once, than guilt." - William Shakespeare

"Come hither, come hither, come hither: here shall he see no enemy but winter and rough weather." - William Shakespeare

"Death my lord, Their clothes are after such a pagan cut to 't That sure th' have worn out Christendom. The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Chamberlain at I, iii)" - William Shakespeare

"Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task" - William James

"One that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning." - William Shakespeare

"Over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough briar, over park, over pale, thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, swifter than the moon's sphere; and I serve the fairy queen, to dew her orbs upon the green. The cowslips tall her pensioners be; in their gold coats, spots you see; those be rubies, fairy favours, in their freckles live our savours. I must go seek some dew-drops here, and hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. Farewell, thou lob of spirits, i'll be gone; my queen and all her elves come here anon! A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act ii, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most--that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"What the workingmen of the country are profoundly interested in is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the enslaving and degrading wage-system in which they toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest — this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it. As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Pray the gods do not envy your happiness!" - Euripedes NULL