Great Throughts Treasury

"Congress meets tomorrow morning. Let us all pray: Oh Lord, give us strength to bear that which is about to be inflicted upon us. Be merciful with them, oh Lord, for they know not what they're doing. Amen." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I have no Politics. I am for the Party that is out of Power, no matter which one it is. But I will give you my word that, in case of my appointment, I will not be a Republican; I will do my best to pull with you, and not embarrass you. In fact, my views on European affairs are so in accord with you, Mr. President, that I might almost be suspected of being a Democrat." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I tell you, this finding out how to govern a country, or even a state, or county, or even town, has got the whole world licked. There is not a type of government that can point with complete pride and say: There, this is the best that can be had!" - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"If you feel the urge, don't be afraid to go on a wild goose chase. What do you think wild geese are for anyway?" - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"See what will happen if you don’t stop biting your fingernails?" - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"There is no race of people in the world that can compete with a senator for talking. If I went to the Senate, I couldn’t talk fast enough to answer roll call." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The mass of Americans, who vehemently made known their views in (and during) a recent general election, know perfectly well that they are not living in a reign of terror and that they seldom look behind a door for anything more frightening than an umbrella." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"The pessimist stared at his visitor. He had never talked with the Devil before. But he had read descriptions of him by people who had and who remembered Satan as a goat, a bull, a dog, a cat, a big black man with horns, claws and a tail. The presence beside him looked distinguished, relaxed, urbane. Except for a face too characterful to be contemporary, the Devil might have been a movie magnate, an airline executive, a college president, a great surgeon or a grain speculator. “And yet,” thought the pessimist, “those are certainly not the eyes of a Yale man.”" - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!" - Wilhelm Reich

"Rulers and generals muster their troops. Magnates muster the sums of money which give them power. The fascist dictators muster the irrational human reactions which make it possible for them to attain and maintain their power over the masses. The scientists muster knowledge and means of research. But, thus far, no organization fighting for freedom has ever mustered the biological arsenal where the weapons are to be found for the establishment and the maintenance of human freedom. All precision of our social existence notwithstanding, there is as yet no definition of the word freedom which would be in keeping with natural science. No word is more misused and misunderstood. To define freedom is the same as to define sexual health. But nobody will openly admit this. The advocacy of personal and social freedom is connected with anxiety and guilt feelings. As if to be free were a sin or at least not quite as it should be. Sex-economy makes this guilt feeling comprehensible: freedom without sexual self-determination is in itself a contradiction. But to be sexual means — according to the prevailing human structure — to be sinful or guilty. There are very few people who experience sexual love without guilt feeling. "Free love" has acquired a degrading meaning: it lost the meaning given it by the old fighters for freedom. In films and in books, to be genital and to be criminal are presented as the same thing." - Wilhelm Reich

"The fact that political ideologies are tangible, active realities does not prove their necessity. The bubonic plague was an extremely potent social reality. But nobody would have argued that, because it existed, it was necessary and nothing should be done about it." - Wilhelm Reich

"What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That's what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You're a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don't want the thorns of my roses. Haven't you too, little psychiatrist, been cracking silly jokes about me? Haven't you ridiculed me as the prophet of bigger and better orgasms? Have you never heard the whimpering of a young wife whose body has been desecrated by an impotent husband? Or the anguished cry of an adolescent bursting with unfulfilled love? Does your security still mean more to you than your patient? How long will you go on valuing your respectability above your medical mission? How long will you refuse to see that your pussyfooting procrastination is costing millions their lives?" - Wilhelm Reich

"Work-democracy adds a decisive piece of knowledge to the scope of ideas related to freedom. The masses of people who work and bear the burden of social existence on their shoulders neither are conscious of their social responsibility nor are they capable of assuming the responsibility for their own freedom. This is the result of the century-long suppression of rational thinking, the natural functions of love, and scientific comprehension of the living. Everything related to the emotional plague in social life can be traced back to this incapacity and lack of consciousness. It is work-democracy’s contention that, by its very nature, politics is and has to be unscientific, i.e., that it is an expression of human helplessness, poverty, and suppression." - Wilhelm Reich

"You are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it in the belief of doing it for the sake of "socialism," or "the state," or "national honor," or "the glory of God."" - Wilhelm Reich

"Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns." - Walter Bagehot

"The poets speak only poetry, not program, not policy, not even advocacy, only poetry. But the poetry exists in order to make available what the ideologues are unable to see and what the policy makers are unable to grasp." - Walter Brueggemann

"What a commission it is to speak a future that none think imaginable! Of course that cannot be done by inventing new symbols for that is wishful thinking. Rather it means to move back into the deepest memories of this community and activate those very symbols that have always been the very basis for contradicting the regnant consciousness. Therefore the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history. And when the prophet returns with the community to those deep symbols they will discern that hope is not a late tacked on hypothesis to serve a crisis but rather the primal dimension of every memory of this community. The memory of this community begins in God's promissory address to the darkness of chaos, to barren Sarah, and to oppressed Egyptian slaves. The speech of God is first about an alternative future." - Walter Brueggemann

"Nobody has worked harder at inactivity with such a force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task." - Walter Lippmann

"The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about." - Walter Lippmann

"Mr. Reagan will raise taxes; and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." - Walter Mondale, fully Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale

"Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations." - Wendell Berry

"To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity." - Wendell Berry

"Poor Poe! At first so forgotten that his grave went without a tomb-stone twenty-six years. . . today in danger of becoming the life study of a few professors." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy

"Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Let the “socialist” snivelers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the free workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are entitled only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The tolerance of all religions is a law of nature, stamped on the hearts of all men." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"I’ve never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising." - Václav Havel

"He tries to explain why man behaves most improbably, strangely, at variance with his nature, how it is possible for instance that a calm, rather neutral petty bourgeois is all of a sudden capable of commanding a concentration camp, burning to death or gassing thousands of people, and afterwards returning to his clerk's life as if nothing happened" - Václav Havel

"Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither... can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard." - Václav Havel

"The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures. The most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships —i.e., the relationships between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences." - Václav Havel

"What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and perhaps what has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such." - Václav Havel

"When a person tries to act in accordance with his conscience, when he tries to speak the truth, when he tries to behave like a citizen, even in conditions where citizenship is degraded, it won't necessarily lead anywhere, but it might. There's one thing, however, that will never lead anywhere, and that is speculating that such behavior will lead somewhere." - Václav Havel

"The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes, than the nation's life itself." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Too much law was too much government; and too much government was too little individual privilege,- as too much individual privilege in its turn was selfish license" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Imagine a nineteenth-century Jane Fonda visiting the Oglala Sioux in the Black Hills before the battle at Little Big Horn. Imagine her examining Crazy Horse's arrows or climbing upon Sitting Bull's horse. Such behavior by a well-known actress no doubt would have infuriated Gen. George Armstrong Custer, but what would the rest of us feel today" - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"Protest, even more than property, is a sacred resource of American society. It begins with radical minorities at the margins, eventually marching into the mainstream, where their views become the majority sentiment. Prophetic minorities instigated the American Revolution, ended slavery, achieved the vote for women, made trade unions possible, and saved our rivers from becoming sewers." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"A mockingbird ... was heard to blend the songs of 32 different kinds of birds into a ten minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking." - William Godwin

"Nor is it a valid objection to say "that, by such a rule, we are making every man a judge in his own case." In the courts of morality it cannot be otherwise; a pure and just system of thinking admits not of the existence of any infallible judge to whom we can appeal. It might indeed be further objected "that, by this rule, men will be called upon to judge in the moment of passion and partiality, instead of being referred to the past decisions of their cooler reason." But this also is an inconvenience inseparable from human affairs. We must and ought to keep our selves open, to the last moment, to the influence of such considerations as may appear worthy to influence us. To teach men that they must not trust their own understandings is not the best scheme for rendering them virtuous and consistent. On the contrary, to inure them to consult their understanding is the way to render it worthy of becoming their director and guide." - William Godwin

"There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape." - William Godwin

"The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one's country may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why should men not someday feel that is it worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark until the whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may someday seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden." - William James