Great Throughts Treasury

"When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they don't understand one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to." - Helen Rowland

"Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"The overbearing matter-of-factness which sacrifices the subject to the ascertainment of the truth, rejects at once truth and objectivity." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"The process has aroused much antagonism, a great part of which is wholly without warrant. It is not true that as the rich have grown richer the poor have grown poorer. On the contrary, never before has the average man, the wage-worker, the farmer, the small trader, been so well off as in this country and at the present time. There have been abuses connected with the accumulation of wealth; yet it remains true that a fortune accumulated in legitimate business can be accumulated by the person specially benefited only on condition of conferring immense incidental benefits upon others. Successful enterprise, of the type which benefits all mankind, can only exist if the conditions are such as to offer great prizes as the rewards of success." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"To any nation that stands for human liberties, they have an Ally in the United States." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"It takes heroic humility to be yourself." - Thomas Merton

"In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas— and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"Every seemingly arbitrary destructive action is a reaction of the organism to the frustration of a gratification of a vital need, especially of a sexual need." - Wilhelm Reich

"Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one’s life well and happily." - Wilhelm Reich

"With this the [genuine] leader will cause many to turn against him. He will have robbed these many of an object to hold on to, like a bean stalk would feel robbed of comfort if you took away the supporting stick of wood." - Wilhelm Reich

"It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results." - Walter Bagehot

"A large part of the mischief and folly of the world comes from rushing in, taking a position, and then not knowing how to retreat. There is something about making a speech or writing an article which perverts the human mind. When the utterance is published, the Rubicon has been crossed and the bridges have been burned. It seems to end in the inquiry, after that we almost cease to be interested in the truth, being so preoccupied to prove that we already possess it." - Walter Lippmann

"An infinity of forests lies dormant within the dreams of one Acorn." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"Freedom of criticism is undoubtedly the most fashionable slogan at the present time, and the one most frequently employed in the controversies between socialists and democrats in all countries." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"He who now talks about the "freedom of the press" goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"International unity of the workers is more important than the national." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The chief distinguishing feature of Russia in regard to the point we are examining is that the very beginning of the spontaneous working-class movement, on the one hand, and of the turn of progressive public opinion towards Marxism, on the other, was marked by the combination of manifestly heterogeneous elements under a common flag to fight the common enemy (the obsolete social and political world outlook)." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"This struggle must be organized, according to “all the rules of the art”, by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organization of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"There's just this… an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm." - Victor Hugo

"We are suffering today from a species of Christianity as dry as dust, as cold as ice, as pale as a corpse, and as dead as King Tut. We are suffering not from a lack of correct heads but of consumed hearts." - Vance Havner

"The maxims of men betray their hearts." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless someday bring about." - William James

"Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will… and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia." - William James

"Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Do not be scared where it leads the way. Instead, focus on the first step. This is the hardest part and that of her liability. Once you do the first step, let everything follow its natural course, and the rest will be ordered only. Not drift. You yourself be over." - Elif Safak

"I am so in love with you that there isnÂ’t anything else." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Speaking on the near skepticism of the study of the history of philosophy:" - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"For a long time the conviction has been dimly felt in the community that, without prejudice to existing institutions, the legal day of weekly rest might be employed to advantage for purposes affecting the general good." - Felix Adler

"The moral order never is, but is ever becoming. It grows with our growth." - Felix Adler

"With the first wife is matrimony, the second company, the third heresy." -