Great Throughts Treasury

"Prejudice is not held against people because they have evil qualities. Evil qualities are imputed to people because prejudices are held against them." - Marshall Wingfield

"How happy is he born or taught, That serveth not another’s will; Whose armor is his honest thought And simple truth his utmost skill! Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing, yet hath all. You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes More by your number than your light; You common people of the skies,— What are you when the moon shall rise? An itch of disputing will prove the scab of churches. I am but a gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuff. Idle time not idly spent. Now all nature seemed in love, and birds had drawn their valentines." - Henry Wotton, fully Sir Henry Wotton

"Freedom springs from within, whether in a man or in a people. To remove disabilities and confer the franchise is not enough. Men must be enabled to grow if they are to exercise their rights with dignity and effect. For this reason the widening of the franchise in democratic countries has always been accompanied or followed by the development of popular education." - Basil Alfred Yeaxlee

"Giving of yourself, learning to be tolerant, giving recognition and approval to others, remaining flexible enough to mature and learn - yields happiness, harmony, contentment and productivity. These are the qualities of a rich life, the bounteous harvest of getting along with people." - Jack C. Yewell

"Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want." - Margaret Young, born Margaret Youngblood

"We are the people our parents warned us about." - Youth Movement Slogan NULL

"When performing a good deed and other people are present, imagine you are standing in a forest surrounded only by trees and flowers. In the long run there is no difference between the two situations. Just as the trees have no awareness of what you are doing, so too in the long run it does not make a difference what those people thought about you for the few seconds they saw you." - Alexander Ziskind Maimon

"The majority of people who seek physical pleasures and all forms of entertainment are trying to push away the gnawing feeling of emptiness in their lives and the sadness that is an integral part of worldly matters." -

"See how the people act, and that is the law." - Abaye NULL

"Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the everchanging and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself!" - Bernice Abbott

"Develop the art of friendliness. One can experience a variety of emotions staying home and reading or watching television; one will be alive but hardly living. Most of the meaningful aspects of life are closely associated with people. Even the dictionary definition of life involves people." - William L. Abbott

"Not everybody trust paintings but people believe photographs." - Ansel Adams

"Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody, rather than for somebody." - Franklin Pierce Adams, pen name F.P.A.

"The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time." - Franklin Pierce Adams, pen name F.P.A.

"People with many interests live, not only longest, but happiest. People with interests are never bores!" - George Matthew Adams

"You are the greatest investment. The more you store in that mind of yours, the more you enrich your experience, the more people you meet, the more books you read, and the more places you visit, the greater is that investment in all that you are. Everything that you add to your peace of mind, and to your outlook upon life, is added capital that no one but yourself can dissipate." - George Matthew Adams

"The super-businessmen have to a large extent failed to see that the need for morality in the people they practically govern is greater than ever, because social relations are infinitely more delicate and complex in adjustment than heretofore." - James R. Adams

"Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it has been discovered before. Lastly, they say that they always believed it." -

"It is a small thing to accept people for what they are; if we really love them we must want them to be what they are." - Alain Pen name of Emile-Auguste Chartier

"People who are in despair always make a mistake when they hang themselves; the next day often brings the unknown." -

"Any interference with nature is damnable. Not only nature but also the people will suffer." - Anahareo, given name Gertrude Moltke Bernard NULL

"In the life of a nation ideas are not the only things of value. Sentiment also is of great value; and the way to foster sentiment in a people, and to develop it in the young, is to have a well-recorded past, and to be familiar with it." - Joseph Anderson, fully Joseph Inslee Anderson

"I have sometimes a queer mystical feeling as regards the attitude of people in general. Just as there are physical diseases, so there are diseases of feelings. In a little town like this I feel that on some days everyone goes about hating everyone else. Then something happens and a good feeling comes back. I think the whole of mankind must be like that." - Sherwood Anderson

"A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and common sense now assign to it." - François Arago, fully François Jean Dominique Arago

"It was not until I was forty that I was able to go into a room and say to myself, 'What do I think of these people?' Before that, I always thought, 'What do these people think of me?'" - Brooke Astor, (née Russell, previously Kuser and Marshall) also known as Mrs Vincent Astor

"The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or nothing." -

"In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one every thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

"In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

"Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

"People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

"We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sounds like heresy or plots." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

"Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice." - W. H. Auden and J. Garrett

"What people will say - in these words there lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words bear sway everywhere." - Berthold Auerbach

"The people... is an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of right and by a community of interests... Where there is no true justice there can be no right." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think." - Alfred Austin

"Ride your emotions as a scallop rides the waves; don't get upset among them. There are people who enjoy getting swamped emotionally just as, incredibly, there are people who enjoy getting drunk." - Mary Hunter Austin

"The reason so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know something." - Walter Bagehot

"A successful house anywhere is one where you sense immediately that the people who live in it are really involved in being alive." -

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain" -

"The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority." - George Bancroft

"Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everyone and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want." - Clive Barnes, fully Clive Alexander Barnes

"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature. But beautiful old people are works of art." - Marjorie Barstow

"Security is never absolute... The government of a free people must take certain chances for the sake of maintaining freedom which the government of a police state avoids because it holds freedom to be of no value." - Alan Barth

"Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people." - John Barth, fully John Simmons Barth

"Government is not a substitute for people, but simply an instrument through which they act. And if the individual fails to do his duty as a citizen, government becomes a very deadly instrument." - Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch

"We must remember that the people do not belong to the government but that governments belong to the peoples." - Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch

"It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For it, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree." - Charles Pierre Baudelaire

"Most people don't plan to fail; they fail to plan." - John L Beckley

"How desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is much easier to be honest with other people." - E. F. Benson, fully Edward Frederic "E.F." Benson

"Anyone who is thoroughly familiar with the language and literature of a people cannot be wholly its enemy." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson