Great Throughts Treasury

"I am well aware of the fact that the human race has known about the existence of a universal energy related to life for many ages. However, the basic task of natural science consisted of making this energy usable. This is the sole difference between my work and all preceding knowledge." - Wilhelm Reich

"If one studies the history of sexual suppression one finds that it does not exist in the early stages of culture formation. Therefore, it cannot be the prerequisite of culture. Rather, it appears at a relatively late stage of culture, at the time of the development of authoritarian patriarchy and of class distinctions. At that stage, the sexual interests of all begin to serve the profit interests of a minority. This process has assumed a solid organizational form in the institutions of patriarchal marriage and patriarchal family. With the suppression of sexuality the emotions undergo a change: a sex-negating religion begins to develop which gradually builds up its own sex-political organization, the church in all its forms, which has no other goal than that of eradicating sexual pleasure. This has its sociological reason in the exploitation of human work which sets in at this stage." - Wilhelm Reich

"My ties and ballasts leave me - I travel - I sail - My elbows rest in the sea-gaps. I skirt the sierras. My palms cover continents - I am afoot with my vision." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

"I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

"It is stupid to tolerate "Nikola;" all Chekists have to be on alert to shoot anyone who doesn't turn up to work because of "Nikola."" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow at any cost. To delay action is the same as death." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the current scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental, because it differs from their own." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"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

"I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be more or less the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious and misery so unsupportable. So far as related to myself I resolved, and this resolution has never been entirely forgotten by me, to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer." - William Godwin

"Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly." - William James

"Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift." - William James

"This was the very limit beyond which none of them had ever speculated, or even known that there was any speculation to be done." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"Sure, nothing succeeds like success. Fact is, dearest, we are fools. We cling to an ideal no one wants or cares about. I am the greater fool of the two of us. I go on eating out my heart and poisoning every moment of my life in the attempt to rouse people's sensibilities. At least if I could do it with closed eyes. The irony is I see the futility of my efforts and yet I can't let go." - Emma Goldman

"The first thing that we have to realize is a fact of fundamental importance, because it means breaking away from all the ordinary prepossessions of orthodoxy. The plain fact is that Jesus taught no theology whatever. His teaching is entirely spiritual or metaphysical. Historical Christianity, unfortunately, has largely concerned itself with theological and doctrinal questions which, strange to say, have no part whatever in the Gospel teaching. It will startle many good people to learn that all the doctrines and theologies of the churches are human inventions built up by their authors out of their own mentalities… There is absolutely no system of theology of doctrine to be found in the Bible; it simply is not there." - Emmet Fox

"I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I think it's unfortunate and really reflects the mean-spirited nature of the anti-abortion movement that it is willing to sacrifice poor women in this debate as a means of making gains. Abortion is legal in this country and is not something that should be denied women, but anti-abortion advocates suggest that if they can't deny it to every woman, they will at least deny it to low-income women." - Faye Wattleton

"One who makes his bed must lie in it." -