Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Race

"Religion... sex... race... money... avoidance rites... malnutrition... dreams - no part of these can be looked at and clearly seen without looking at the whole of them. For, as a painter mixes colors and makes of them new colors, so religion is turned into something different by race, and segregation is colored as much by sex as by skin pigment, and money is no longer a coin but a lost wish wandering through a man’s whole life." - Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith

"Taken as a whole, men will only devote their enthusiasm, their time, and their energy to matters in which their passions have a personal interest. But their personal interests, however powerful they may be, will never carry them very far or very high unless they can be made to seem noble and legitimate in their own eyes by being allied to some good cause in which the whole human race can join." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"We talk about a space race. There is a space race down here on the ground. In this race every human being is superpower and the competition no longer stands a chance. Other species are bound to this or that patch of turf, and this planet. We feel bound to no patch of turn on Earth, bound only for the stars. We sacrifice a marsh, a bay, a park, a lake. We sacrifice a sparrow. We trade one countdown for another." - Jonathan Weiner

"Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race." - Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"The young men of this land are called a "lost" race - they are a race that has never yet been discovered. And the whole secret, power, and knowledge of their own discovery is locked within them - they know it, feel it, have the whole thing in them - and they cannot utter it." - Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe

"In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again; and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility toward human life." -

"The soul of the great mystic does not stop at ecstasy, as at the end of a journey. The ecstasy is indeed rest, if you like, but as though at a station, where the engine is still under steam, the onward movement becoming a vibration on one spot, until it is time to race forward again." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"We were born to unite with our fellowmen, and to join in community with the human race." -

"Uncontrolled technology can certainly bring down disaster, perhaps irreparable, as our race. The only protection against it is a growth in man’s spiritual and moral maturity proportionate to his growth in technical skill and power." - W. Norris Clarke

"A little “splitting” of the rays of religion and a little “releasing of the energy” of the Bible seems in order. If we would only spend sums like the two billion dollars spent on our atomic bombs to harness the forces of God’s teachings, what a blessing it would be for the human race." -

"It is from the very element of the eternal and the unlimited, which the materialist seeks to deny, that the true progress of the human race has sprung." - Christopher Henry Dawson

"The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind." - John Dewey

"It is always the minorities that hold the key of progress; it is always through those who are unafraid to be different that advance comes to the human race." - Raymond B. Fosdick, fully Raymond Blaine Fosdick

"If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started." - Marcus Garvey

"I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don’t want to buy things they don’t need to impress people they dislike." - Emile Gavreau, fully Emile Henry Gavreau

"God will not ask man of what race he is, He will ask what he has done." - Adi Granth or Aad Granth, literally "the first scripture"

"Rites [li] rest on three bases: heaven and earth, which are the source of all life; the ancestors, who are the source of the human race; [and] sovereigns and teachers, who are the source of government... Should any of the three be missing, either there would be no people or people would be without peace. Hence rites are to serve Heaven on high and earth below, and to honor the ancestors and elevate the sovereigns and teachers... Who holds to the rites is never confused in the midst of multifarious change; who deviates therefrom is lost. Rites - are they not the culmination of culture?" - Hsun-Tzu NULL

"Revelation does not give anything to the human race which human reason, if left to itself, would not attain; but it has given and still gives the most important of these things earlier." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

"What education is to the individual, revelation is to the whole human race." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

"Religion, patriotism, race and sex are the favorite red herrings of foul political method – they are the most successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult." -

"In the field of modern cosmology, the first principle is called “the Cosmological Principle.” It says that the universe has no center, that it has the same properties throughout. Every place in the universe has, in this sense, equal rights. How can the human race, which has evolved in a universe of such fundamental equality, fail to strive for a society without violence and terror? How can we fail to build a world in which the rights due to every human being from birth are respected?" - Fang Lizhe

"Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights." - José Martí, fully José Julián Martí Pérez

"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood." -

"The present world crisis... is a crisis of man’s spirit. It is a great religious and moral upheaval of the human race, and we do not really know half the causes of this upheaval." - Thomas Merton

"Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State… whoever raises these notions above their standard values and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God." -

"Life is the sacred spark of God in us, and the best of our race have reverenced it most." - Walter Rauschenbusch

"Nations will rise and fall, but equality remains the ideal. The universal aim is to achieve respect for the entire human race, not for the dominant few." - Carlos Peña Rómulo

"Pride of race is the antidote to prejudice." - Arthur A Schomburg

"Hate is still the main enemy of the human race, the fuel that heats the furnaces of genocide." - Isidor Feinstein Stone

"The arms race is based on an optimistic view of technology and a pessimistic view of man. It assumes there is no limit to the ingenuity of science and no limit to the deviltry of human beings." - Isidor Feinstein Stone

"Whosoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff

"The dominant fact of the twentieth century is that the entire population of the earth is now included within a single community. There are no more ocean barriers, no mountain barriers, no barriers of the north and south poles, no barriers of any kind. Thers is only one race now - it is the human race." - Obert C. Tanner, fully Obert Clark Tanner

"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem." -

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." -

"It is one of the paradoxes of the human race and possibly its last paradox, that the people who control the fortunes of our community should at the same time be wildly radical in matters that concern our own change of our environment, and rigidly conservative in the social matters that determine our adaptation to it." -

"The human race cannot forever exist half-exploiter and half-exploited." - Henry Ford

"Most teachers do not like controversy. A study some years ago found that 92 percent of teachers did not initiate discussion of controversial issues, 89 percent didn't discuss controversial issues when students brought them up, and 79 percent didn't believe they should. Among the topics that teachers felt children were interested in discussing but that most teachers believed should not be discussed in the classroom were the Vietnam War, politics, race relations, nuclear war, religion, and family problems such as divorce." - Jack L. Nelson & William B. Stanley

"I believe that one of the characteristics of the human race, possibly the one that is primarily responsible for its course of evolution, is that it has grown by creatively responding to failure." - Glen Therodorei Seaborg

"Slow and steady wins the race." - Aesop NULL

"Slow and steady wins the race." -

"Slow and steady wins the race." -

"The human race has had long experience and a find tradition in surviving adversity. But now we face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity." - Alan Gregg

"The human race has had long experience and a find tradition in surviving adversity. But now we face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity." -

"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! it's a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting." - Albert Camus

"We are all special cases. We all want to appeal to something! Everyone insists on his innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven." - Albert Camus

"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! it's a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting." -

"We are all special cases. We all want to appeal to something! Everyone insists on his innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven." -

"A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Art can be described as a psychopathic reaction of the race to the stresses of existence." - Alfred North Whitehead