Great Throughts Treasury

"Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"It is unacceptable that nations made up of people who have only just come down from the trees should take themselves for world leaders . . . How can such primitive beings have an opinion of their own?" - Yitzhak Shamir, born Icchak Jaziernicki

"Wearily the sentry moves muttering the one word: "Peace."" - Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington

"My breast I am smiting, My own sins indicting. How then canst Thou draw me To strife and thus awe me, And bring Me to judgment? My branch hangeth ailing, My eyelid is failing, My aims to derision Are turned by the vision Of Thee bringing judgment. The creditor calleth, The dread decree falleth, The awful day breaking God’s creatures sets quaking In fear of His judgment. Through Thy attributes preaching, Almighty, and teaching, O weigh aberration In the scale of salvation, Nor bring us to judgment. In Thy merciful fashion Award us compassion, That man who but dust is May handle with justice The haters of judgment. Like a vapour evanished, Man is melted and banished, His birth is coëval With a harvest of evil, ’Tis Thou must bring judgment. We await—O behold us— Thy love to enfold us. Did Thy warning not hasten Our impulse to chasten? For the Lord loveth judgment." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

"The seeker of good shall acceptance find From the God whose glory is boundless, If he turn unto Him with repentant mind, And sackcloth on both of his shoulders bind By way of memorial. So come and return to our God on high Who fashioned the uttermost heavens, Let your songs of praise to His footstool fly And thank Him to-night in a choral cry By way of memorial. O King of the Kingdom that hails Thy name Since first to the void Thou spakest, Evoking the light that from darkness came, Accept this plea to expunge my shame As rite of memorial. Prepare, O Israel, to meet Thy God, Let every man seek to find ransom, Remove the evil at which ye nod, Cleanse ye and wash ye or dread His rod This day of memorial." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate now knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares." - Samuel Paterson

"Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically - to promote a cause you believe in." - Saul Alinsky, fully Saul David Alinsky

"As a simple example of what We mean, consider the extremely critical problems which exist today in the political and economic spheres. Men are so worried by these things that they give scant thought to those religious concerns, which are the province of the Church's teaching authority. All this is evil, and we are right to condemn it. But this new state of affairs has at least one undeniable advantage: it has eliminated the innumerable obstacles erected by worldly men to impede the Church's freedom of action. We have only to take a cursory glance through the annals of the Church to realize that even those ecumenical councils which are recorded there in letters of gold, were celebrated in the midst of serious difficulties and most distressing circumstances, through the unwarranted intervention of the civil authority. Such intervention was sometimes dictated by a sincere intention on the part of the secular princes to protect the Church's interests, but more often than not their motives were purely political and selfish, and the resultant situation was fraught with spiritual disadvantage and danger. " - Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II

"16 Rules for Investment Success - Invest — don’t trade or speculate. “The stock market is not a casino, but if you move in and out of stocks every time they move a point or two…the market will be your casino.” Remain flexible and open-minded about types of investment. “There are times to buy blue chip stocks, cyclical stocks, corporate bonds, U.S. Treasury instruments, and so on. And there are times to sit on cash…The fact is there is no one kind of investment that is always best.” Buy low. “It is extremely difficult to go against the crowd — to buy when everyone else is selling or has sold, to buy when things look darkest…[but] chances are if you buy what everyone is buying you will do so only after it is already overpriced.” When buying stocks, search for bargains among quality stocks. “Determining quality in a stock is like reviewing a restaurant. You don’t expect it to be 100% perfect, but before it gets three or four stars you want it to be superior.” Diversify. “In stocks and bonds, as in much else, there is safety in numbers.” Do your homework or hire wise experts to help you. “People will tell you: Investigate before you invest. Listen to them. Study companies to learn what makes them successful.” Don’t panic. “The time to sell is before the crash, not after.” Learn from your mistakes. “The only way to avoid mistakes is not to invest — which is the biggest mistake of all…The big difference between those who are successful and those who are not is that successful people learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others.” An investor who has all the answers doesn’t even understand all the questions. “A cocksure approach to investing will lead, probably sooner than later, to disappointment if not outright disaster. Even if we can identify an unchanging handful of investing principles, we cannot apply these rules to an unchanging universe of investments—or an unchanging economic and political environment. Everything is in a constant state of change, and the wise investor recognizes that success is a process of continually seeking answers to new questions.” Do not be fearful or negative too often. “Even in the dark ’70s, many professional money managers — and many individual investors too — made money in stocks, especially those of smaller companies. There will, of course, be corrections, perhaps even crashes. But, over time, our studies indicate stocks do go up…and up…and up.”" - John Templeton, fully Sir John Marks Templeton

"Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"It's difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn't available" - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"Of all sorts of earthly good the price is self-denial.—The lower must be sacrificed for the greater; the coarser give place to the finer.—Every step of our progress toward success is a sacrifice.—We gain by losing; grow by dwindling; live by dying." - Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

"Majority rule is no more a natural right than is equality. When we accept the principle of majorities in politics, we do so out of prudence and expediency, not because of an abstract moral injunction." - Russell Kirk

"God is to be worshiped by faith, hope and love." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfills itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community." - Salvador de Madariaga, fully Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo

"Our Sages were enemies of ignorance. They regarded education, intellectual enlightenment, and the acquisition of knowledge as the first of all moral commandments. They viewed the dissemination of intellectual enlightenment among all classes of the population as the prime concern of the nation, and the training of a child's mind as the first and most sacred duty of fatherhood. They considered it a matter of conscience for every Jewish father to see that his child should not remain a boor and am ha'arets; no Jewish child must be allowed to grow up as an ignorant, uneducated person." - Samson Raphael Hirsch

"’Tis a strange species of generosity which requires a return infinitely more valuable than anything it could have bestowed; that demands as a reward for a defense of our property a surrender of those inestimable privileges, to the arbitrary will of vindictive tyrants, which alone give value to that very property." - Samuel Adams

"In my opinion, we have been tolerant too long of men who have gone about the country declaring the size of their hearts, and repeatedly offering up their necks for the hangmen's noose as their stock in trade for practical work in the labor movement." - Samuel Gompers

"Under the circumstances you mention I should say that the young lady button workers can organize separately as a union. . . . While this is so it is . . . not the best or wisest step. These men and women all work together and their interests are identical and each one discussing them should discuss them jointly in order to arrive at the best possible conclusions. However as I say if they insist upon organizing a separate union it is better to have them organized in that way than not organized at all." - Samuel Gompers

"There is no wisdom in useless and hopeful sorrow; but there is something in it so like virtue that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved, nor will by me, at least, be thought worthy of esteem." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Enthusiasm ... the sustaining power of all great action." - Samuel Smiles

"Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first." - Samuel Eliot Morison

"It is really too sad that it may happen in life as in chess, where a false move can force us to lose the game, but with this difference, that we cannot begin a return match." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Make haste! The tide of Fortune soon ebbs." - Silius Italicus, fully Tiberius Catius Asconius Silius Italicus

"Our hatred knows no bounds, and the war shall be to the death." - Simón Bolívar, fully Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco

"Freedom is not a gift of heaven, you have to fight for it every day," - Simon Wiesenthal

"If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself—the need for Unity, the need for God—they wouldn’t believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value." - Simone Weil

"Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being." - Simone Weil

"It is no ready-made article; it has grown through the centuries as native to our country and people as the oak, ash, or thorn. It has given her people freedom and taught them the difference between freedom and license. That is the Constitution that is threatened to-day, not quite openly yet, by the Socialist Party in their conference, tendenciously by sketching a course of action which if it takes place means the destruction of the Constitution. You may dispute that as much as you like, but in effect taking away the executive power of the House of Commons is the way every tyranny starts. It is proletarian Hitlerism and nothing else, and it can be nothing else. I want you to realize it in time." - Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

"Then comes Winston with his hundred horsepower mind and what can I do?" - Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

"How comfortable it is to have One, day and night, before the throne to control the charge of our enemy, and the despondencies of our souls." - Stephen Charnock

"Our first object is... the obtaining of sovereignty, assured by international law, over a portion of the globe sufficiently large to satisfy our just requirements." - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl

"The body is a marvelous machine...a chemical laboratory, a power-house. Every movement, voluntary or involuntary, full of secrets and marvels!" - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl

"When, in the late 1940''s, we faced a global Cold War against another system of ideological fanatics certain that their authoritarian values would eventually rule the world, we prevailed in time; We prevailed because we exercised patience as well as vigilance, self-restraint as well as self-defense, and reached out to moderates and modernists, to democrats and dissidents, within that closed system." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen

"And now, first and foremost, you can never afford to forget for a moment what is the object of our forest policy. That object is not to preserve forests because they beautiful, though that is good in itself; nor because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself; but the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes. It is part of the traditional policy of home making in our country. Every other consideration comes as secondary. You yourselves have got to keep this practical object before your minds: to remember that a forest which contributes nothing to the wealth, progress, or safety of the country is of no interest to the Government, and should be of little interest to the forester. Your attention must be directed to the preservation of forests, not as an end in itself, but as the means of preserving and increasing the prosperity of the nation." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"City streets are unsatisfactory playgrounds for children because of the danger, because most good games are against the law, because they are too hot in summer, and because in crowded sections of the city they are apt to be schools of crime. Neither do small back yards nor ornamental grass plots meet the needs of any but the very small children. Older children who would play vigorous games must have places especially set aside for them; and, since play is a fundamental need, playgrounds should be provided for every child as much as schools. This means that they must be distributed over the cities in such a way as to be within walking distance of every boy and girl, as most children can not afford to pay carfare." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Facing the immense complexity of modern social and industrial conditions, there is need to use freely and unhesitatingly the collective power of all of us; and yet no exercise of collective power will ever avail if the average individual does not keep his or her sense of personal duty, initiative, and responsibility. There is need to develop all the virtues that have the state for their sphere of action; but these virtues are as dust in a windy street unless back of them lie the strong and tender virtues of a family life based on the love of the one man for the one woman and on their joyous and fearless acceptance of their common obligation to the children that are theirs. There must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight in the many-sided beauty of life." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Finally, we must keep ever in mind that a republic such as ours can exist only by virtue of the orderly liberty which comes through the equal domination of the law over all men alike, and through its administration in such resolute and fearless fashion as shall teach all that no man is above it and no man below it." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: hit the line hard." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"In our complex industrial civilization of today the peace of righteousness and justice, the only kind of peace worth having, is at least as necessary in the industrial world as it is among nations. There is at least as much need to curb the cruel greed and arrogance of part of the world of capital, to curb the cruel greed and violence of part of the world of labor, as to check a cruel and unhealthy militarism in international relationships." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"It is better to be faithful than famous." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"It's not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the doer of deeds might have done them better. Instead, the credit belongs to the man in the arena whose face is marred by sweat and blood and tears." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but in finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"My hat's in the ring. The fight is one and I'm stripped to the buff." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"No foreign policy-no matter how ingenious-has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of few and carried in the hearts of many." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance. Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as trusts, appeal especially to hatred and fear. These are precisely the two emotions, particularly when combined with ignorance, which unfit men for the exercise of cool and steady judgment. In facing new industrial conditions, the whole history of the world shows that legislation will generally be both unwise and ineffective unless undertaken after calm inquiry and with sober self-restraint. [...] All this is true; and yet it is also true that there are real and grave evils, one of the chief being over-capitalization because of its many baleful consequences; and a resolute and practical effort must be made to correct these evils. There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This [...] is based upon sincere conviction that combination and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment this conviction is right." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal; and the first, and most elementary, kind of square deal is to give him in advance full information as to just what he can, and what he cannot, legally and properly do. It is absurd, and much worse than absurd, to treat the deliberate lawbreaker as on an exact par with the man eager to obey the law, whose only desire is to find out from some competent Governmental authority what the law is, and then to live up to it. Moreover, it is absurd to treat the size of a corporation as in itself a crime." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Being rich is an obstacle to loving. When you are rich, you want to continue to be rich, and so you end up devoting all your time, all your energy, in your daily life to stay rich." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"To think that we can have a viable human economy by destroying the earth economy is absurd." - Thomas Berry