Great Throughts Treasury

"To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny." - Simone Weil

"I didn't want to be a f***ing pop star. I wanted to be a protest singer." - Sinéad O’Connor, fully Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor

"The sun is shining all around, but there are some who will only contemplate their own shadows." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"His knowledge was greater than his wisdom, and his powers were far superior to his character." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved." - Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian

"Then, as the Dalai Lama of Tibet (see Chapter 15) often advises, If you find that the teachings suit you, apply them to your life as much as you can. If they don’t suit you, just leave them be." - Stephan Bodian

"If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?" - Stephan Jay Gould

"The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away." - Stephen Hawking

"A man s greatest glory doesn’t consist in never falling, but in rising every time he falls." - Stephen LaBerge

"Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment." - Stefan Zweig

"Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The men with the muck-rake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We have come to recognize that franchises should never be granted except for a limited time, and never without proper provision for compensation to the public. It is my personal belief that the same kind and degree of control and supervision which should be exercised over public-service corporations should be extended also to combinations which control necessaries of life, such as meat, oil, or coal, or which deal in them on an important scale. I have no doubt that the ordinary man who has control of them is much like ourselves. I have no doubt he would like to do well, but I want to have enough supervision to help him realize that desire to do well. I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Because silver and gold have their value from the matter itself, they have first this privilege, that the value of them cannot be altered by the power of one, nor of a few commonwealths, as being a common measure of the commodities of all places. But base money may easily be enhanced or abased." - Thomas Hobbes

"Covenants without swords are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all." - Thomas Hobbes

"No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact." - Thomas Hobbes

"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." - Thomas Hobbes

"When a body is once in motion, it moveth, unless something else hinder it, eternally; and whatsoever hindereth it cannot in an instant, but in time and by degrees, quite extinguish it; and, as we see in the water though the wind cease the waves give not over rolling for a long time after: so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man, then, when he sees, dreams, etc. For, after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it the Latins call ‘imagination,’ from the image made in seeing; and apply the same, though improperly, to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it ‘fancy,’ which signifies ‘appearance,’ and is as proper to one sense as to another. ‘Imagination,’ therefore, is nothing but ‘decaying sense,’ and is found in men, and many other living creatures, as well sleeping as waking." - Thomas Hobbes

"Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christians." - Thomas Jefferson

"In our university [of Virginia] you know there is no Professorship of Divinity. A handle has been made of this, to disseminate an idea that this is an institution, not merely of no religion, but against all religion. Occasion was taken at the last meeting of the Visitors, to bring forward an idea that might silence this calumny, which weighed on the minds of some honest friends to the institution." - Thomas Jefferson

"Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." - Thomas Jefferson

"To secure these [inalienable] rights [to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed... Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on suchprinciples, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." - Thomas Jefferson

"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, by restraining it to true facts and sound principles only. Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." - Thomas Jefferson

"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

"I detest pornography. I utterly loathe writing that seeks to work on the passions and to exploit them, instead of releasing them in a healthy form : laughter … The utterly sick and subhuman reduction of ‘thought’ to nothingness: to something that appears to be sensual but is not even that." - Thomas Merton

"Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation." - Thomas Merton

"The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise God." - Thomas Merton

"It is only by the exercise of reason, that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything." - Thomas Paine

"The declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children is contrary to every principle of moral justice." - Thomas Paine

"There is a natural firmness in some minds, which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude." - Thomas Paine

"Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest. Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home." - Tibetan Book of the Dead NULL

"For more than twenty-five years my mind had been deeply troubled by the fact that these mechanical and scientific achievements of man had outrun his intellectual and spiritual power. ...Throughout the Second World War this terrible problem hung in the back of my mind. As I write these words the problem and the danger are as threatening as ever. We hope our nation will survive, but in its effort to survive will it transform itself intellectually and spiritually into the image of the thing against which we fought?" - Virginia Gildersleeve, fully Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve

"I still have faith occasionally in the brotherhood of man, and in spite of all the tragedies that have intervened since [1945], believe that sometime, somehow, all the nations of the world can work together for the common good." - Virginia Gildersleeve, fully Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve

"If you have faced pain and disappointment, you not only value your happiness more highly, but you are prepared for unpredictable exigencies." - W. Béran Wolfe

"Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread." - William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett

"I hope you do not think me prone to an iteration of nuptials." - William Congreve

"We bear our shades about us; self-deprived Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree." - William Cowper

"No matter whose lips that would speak, they must be free and ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can’t stand discussion, let it crack." - Wendell Phillips

"It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the painter or sculptor. ... That proposition does not admit of discussion. It is a product of the intellectual innocence which I think we surgeons may fairly claim to possess, and which is happily not inconsistent with a quite adequate worldly wisdom." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter

"Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned." - Wilhelm Reich

"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

"In our modern experience, but probably also in every successful and affluent culture, it is believed that enough power and knowledge can tame the terror and eliminate the darkness. A "religion of orientation" fundamentally operates on that basis. But our honest experience, both personal and public, attests to the resilience of the darkness, in spite of us. The" - Walter Brueggemann

"Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content." - Walter Lippmann

"Men with faith can face martyrdom while men without it feel stricken when they are not invited to dinner." - Walter Lippmann

"People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue." - Walter Lippmann

"Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration." - Walter Lippmann

"It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that." - Wendell Berry

"People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food." - Wendell Berry