Great Throughts Treasury

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

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"It is from a strange mixture of tyranny and cowardice that exclusions have been set up and continued. The boldness to do wrong at first, changes afterwards into cowardly craft, and at last into fear. The Representatives in England appear now to act as if they were afraid to do right, even in part, lest it should awaken the nation to a sense of all the wrongs it has endured. This case serves to shew that the same conduct that best constitutes the safety of an individual, namely, a strict adherence to principle, constitutes also the safety of a Government, and that without it safety is but an empty name. When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example of the poor to plunder the rich of his property, for the rights of the one are as much property to him as wealth is property to the other and the little all is as dear as the much. It is only by setting out on just principles that men are trained to be just to each other; and it will always be found, that when the rich protect the rights of the poor, the poor will protect the property of the rich. But the guarantee, to be effectual, must be parliamentarily reciprocal." - Thomas Paine

"Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it." - Thomas Paine

"Religion has two principal enemies, fanaticism and infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality, the other by natural philosophy." - Thomas Paine

"The babbling sounds that mimic echo plays, The fairy shade, and its eternal maze? Nature and Art in all their charms combin'd, And all Elysium to one view confin'd! " - Thomas Tickell

"Joint-stools were then created; on three legs up borne they stood. Three legs upholding firm a massy slab, in fashion square or round. On such a stool immortal Alfred sat." - William Cowper

"I like to hear a man talk about himself because then I never hear anything, but good." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The government says they have loaned over One Billion dollars to the Farmers. In other words, we can't help you make any money, but we will show you where you can owe some more." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"You see, all these laws that they are having so much trouble wondering if they are constitutional, they were all drawn up by lawyers. For almost two-thirds of the membership of the House and Senate are lawyers." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Today we are aware of the high price that had to be paid for it [materi­al progress] and that we will contin­ue to have to pay, and we are by no means still certain that the price is not too high. We distrust the opti­mistic assertion that technology and the machine are complete­ly inno­cent of all this and that the blame rests squarely on man alone who is using them in the wrong way and will just have to learn the right one...The problem of the machine - which happens to be something else than just a highly developed tool - is not merely one of its use, but also one of the machine itself, which, follow­ing its own laws and imposing them on man, extracts its tribute from him." - Wilhelm Röepke

"Don't worry about life, you're not going to survive it anyway." - Walter Bagehot

"In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious." - Walter Bagehot

"All of us have the capacity to attract to ourselves what seems to be missing in our lives." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The most marvelous experience of life is to transform life according to reality, not imagination." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"The reader will understand that I despise these yellows; they are utterly without honor, they are vulgar and cruel; and yet, in spite of all their vices, I count them less dangerous to society than the so-called respectable papers, which pretend to all the virtues, and set the smug and pious tone for good society — papers like the New York Tribune and the Boston Evening Transcript and the Baltimore Sun, which are read by rich old gentlemen and maiden aunts, and can hardly ever be forced to admit to their columns any new or vital event or opinion. These are kept papers, in the strictest sense of the term, and do not have to hustle on the street for money. They serve the pocketbooks of the whole propertied class — which is the meaning of the term respectability in the bourgeois world. On the other hand the yellow journals, serving their own pocketbooks exclusively, will often print attacks on vested wealth, provided the attacks are startling and sensational, and provided the vested wealth in question is not a heavy advertiser." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"If you are an amiable person you treat yourself well, and you also treat others well. You are amiable about everything everywhere. If you are a casual person, you are indifferent about yourself, and you also treat others with indifference. You are casual about everything everywhere. It follows that, as a noble person, in daily life you are prudent, neither excessively and dazzlingly amiable nor excessively dry and indifferent." - Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming

"A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street-corners or the opinions of the newspapers. A nation is led by a man who hears more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice. Such is the man who leads a great, free, democratic nation." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"And let me again remind you that it is only by working with an energy which is almost superhuman and which looks to uninterested spectators like insanity that we can accomplish anything worth the achievement." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Discharge my followers; let them hence away, from Richard's night to Bolingbrooke's fair day. Richard II, Act iii, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare

"Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality." - William James

"The free man cannot be long an ignorant man." - William McKinley

"We do not despise all those who have vices, but we despise all those who have not a single virtue." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"It is those who have compassion for all life who will best safeguard the life of man. Those who become aroused only when man is endangered become aroused too late. We cannot make the world uninhabitable for other forms of life and have it habitable for ourselves. It is the conservationist who is concerned with the welfare of all the land and life of the country, who, in the end, will do most to maintain the world as a fit place for human existence." - Edwin Way Teale

"By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I think he and I should get married!" - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"To Arthur love is a state, not a process; an atmosphere, not a study; an assurance, not a hope; a fact, not an ideal." - Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice." - English Proverbs

"What riches are ours in the world of nature, from the majesty of the distant peak to the fragile beauty of a tiny flower, and all without cost to us, the beholders! No person is poor who has watched a sunrise or who keeps a mountain in his or her heart. " - Esther Baldwin York

"You are going to die like a dog for no good reason" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"It was from him [Joseph Smith] that I learned that the wife of my bosom might be secured to me for time and all eternity; and that the refined sympathies and affections which endeared us to each other emanated from the fountain of divine eternal love. It was from him that I learned that we might cultivate these affections, and grow and increase in the same to all eternityÂ… 'It was from him that I learned the true dignity and destiny of a son of God, clothed with an eternal priesthood, as the patriarch and sovereign of his [family]. It was from him that I learned that the highest dignity of womanhood was, to stand as a queen and priestess to her husband. We qualify for these blessings when we go with a companion to the house of the Lord and receive the sealing ordinances that bind the family unit beyond the grave. These blessings are received in no other way, for as the Lord has decreed, 'Except ye abide my law ye cannot attain to this glory', which glory is an eternal." - Ezra Taft Benson

"Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero - his biography, in other words; everything else we know of him, including the work he may have produced and left behind, tells us only what he is or was." - Hannah Arendt

"Does not simply contain God's word: it becomes God's word for anyone who submits trustfully and in faith to its testimony." - Hans Küng

"Ask not the elves for advice, because they will tell you both 'yes' and 'no'." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien