Great Throughts Treasury

"Liberty is the right to silence." - French Student Revolt Graffiti NULL

"The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and other have no right." - Henry George

"No age or time of life, no position or circumstance, has a monopoly on success. Any age is the right age to start doing!" - Paul Géraldy, pen name of Paul Lefevre

"Not until right is founded upon reverence will it be secure; not until duty is based upon love will it be complete; not until liberty is based on eternal principles will it be full, equal, lofty, and universal." - Henry Giles

"The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it." - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

"Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong." - William Ewart Gladstone

"It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right." - William Ewart Gladstone

"A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"What is freedom of the most free? To do what is right!" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue, and renders a man, in the pursuit of defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition, or contempt." - S. G. Goodrich, fully Samuel Griswold Goodrich, pen name Peter Praley

"Too long denial of guaranteed right is sure to lead to revolution - bloody revolution, where suffering must fall upon the innocent as well as the guilty." - Ulysses S. Grant, fully Ulysses Simpson Grant, born Hiram Ulysses Grant

"War determines not who is right but who is left." - Sidney Greenberg

"Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when the right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing." - Germaine Greer

"The criterion of true beauty is, that it increases on examination; if false, that it lessens. There is therefore, something in true beauty that corresponds with right reason, and is not the mere creation of fancy." -

"Peace among nations, like happiness for the individual, is not an end, but a by-product that usually comes when you live right." - Edward Howard Griggs

"Nothing is small or great in God's sight. Whatever He wills becomes great to us, however seemingly trifling; and if once the voice of conscience tells us that He requires anything of us, we have no right to measure its importance." -

"Nothing is small or great in God’s sight. Whatever He wills becomes great to us, however seemingly trifling; and if once the voice of conscience tells us that He requires anything of us, we have no right to measure its importance." -

"Do the thing that is right even when the boss isn't looking because the boss isn't a criterion. The real boss is standing alongside you every moment of your life." -

"Take care of your health; you have no right to neglect it, and thus become a burden to yourself and perhaps others. Let you food be simple; never eat too much; take exercise enough; be systematic in all things; if unwell, starve yourself till you are well again, and you may throw care to the winds, and physic to the dogs." - William Hall

"The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right, the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weights their interests alongside its own without bias." -

"Right knows no boundaries and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution." -

"Do your duty, and don’t swerve from it. Do that which your conscience tells you to be right, and leave the consequences to God." - Benjamin R. Haydon

"If men would only take the chances of doing right because it is right, instead of the immediate certainly of the advantage of doing wrong, how much happier would their lives be." - Benjamin R. Haydon

"In a family argument, if it turns out you are right, apologize at once." - Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald

"Wherever the right of property clashes with a duty toward humanity, the former has not credentials that are entitled to consideration." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

"If you do not ask the right questions, you do not get the right answers. A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer. Asking questions is the A-B-C of diagnosis. Only the inquiring mind solves problems." - Edward Hodnett

"I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation." - Soozi Holbeche

"Reason is the director of man's will, discovering in action what is good, for the laws of well-doing are the dictates of right reason." - Richard Hooker

"The things of the world are ever rising and falling, and in perpetual change; and this change must be according to the will of God, as he has bestowed upon man neither the wisdom nor the power to enable him to check it. The great lesson in these things is, that man must strengthen himself doubly at such times to fulfill his duty and to do what is right, and must seek his happiness and inward peace from objects which cannot be taken away from him." -

"A philosopher, who purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colors, if by accident he falls into error, goes not farther; but renewing his appeal to common sense, and the natural sentiments of the; mind, returns into the right path, and secures himself from any dangerous illusions." - David Hume

"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously." - Hubert Humphrey, fully Hubert Horatio Humphrey

"Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order." - Robert H. Jackson, fully Robert Houghwout Jackson

"No time exists other than now... So now is all you have and all you ever will have... Why not begin doing the best you can right where you are?... Trust the process of growth. Trust God. Pay attention to the details of your life, doing your very best with each challenge that presents itself... The past is the raw material of the present, but the past is not a blueprint for the present... Begin where you are. Do what you can. Even a small effort to change, to grow, to improve, will bring astonishing results... You can choose to build on what you were, but you are not what you were. You can focus on what you will be, but you are not what you will be. What you are is what you are right now - the inheritor of all of God’s gifts." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

"‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily." - William James

"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." - Thomas Jefferson

"A President's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

"Community of possession must include spontaneity of production ; for what is obtained by labor will be of right the property of him by whose labor it is gained." -

"Every man has a right to utter what he thinks is truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it." -

"It's quicker to act your way into right thinking than to think your way into right acting." - E. Stanley Jones, fully Eli Stanley Jones

"There is no real exellence in all this world which can be separated from right living." - David Starr Jordan

"I am happy in having learned to distinguish between ownership and possession. Books, pictures, and all the beauty of the world belong to those who love and understand them - not usually to those who possess them. All of these things that I am entitled to have I have - I own by divine right. So I care not a bit who possesses them." -

"No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right." -

"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency." - John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton

"What right has any free, reasonable soul on earth to sell himself for a shilling a day to murder any man, right or wrong?" - Charles Kingsley

"It is our right to hate an evil man for his actions, but because his deepest self is the image of God, it is our duty to honor him with love." - Abraham Isaac Kook

"When the Copernican Revolution superseded the ancient Polemic world view, the earth took its rightful place as one planet among many. Man was no longer the center of the universe and though his self-image was deflated, he grew in maturity. In the same way, we must take our rightful place in nature - not as its self-centered and profligate "master" with the divine right of kings to exploit and despoil, but as one species living in harmony with the whole." - R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing

"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's the one who asks the right questions." - Claude Levi-Strauss

"We are a great deal more certain that our will is free than that everything that happens is bound to have a cause. This being the case, could we not for once in a way reverse the argument, and say: our ideas of cause and effect must be very inaccurate, for were they right, our will could not be free?" - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg