Great Throughts Treasury

"We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"When nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (by 1900), when the whole world had been divided up, there was inevitably ushered in the era of monopoly possession of colonies and, consequently, of particularly intense struggle for the division and the re-division of the world." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"A tender, loving concern for all living creatures will need to arise and reign in our hearts if any of us is to survive. And our lives will be truly blessed only when the misery of one is genuinely felt to be the misery of all. The force of love is the force of total revolution. It is the unreleased force, unknown and unexplored as a dynamic for change." - Vimala Thakar

"But being a religious person, I would like to question the validity of everything for myself. That is the essence of religion, which is humility. Not to accept anything unless you understand the meaning there of, personally in your life. If you accept without understanding, you will be imposing upon the mind. And then you are neither true to the mind, nor true to the meaning. The essence of religion, which is humility, lies in uncovering the meaning of life, uncovering the meaning of every moment, learning the meaning for ourselves." - Vimala Thakar

"A good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Everyone wishes to receive kindly treatment, but few people see how harshly they treat themselves by living without esoteric science." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Mental silence is the perfect response to a challenge." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"How you spend your money is how you vote on what exists in the world" - Vicki Robin

"Suddenly finding such a secret in the midst of one's happiness is like the discovery of a scorpion in a nest of turtledoves." - Victor Hugo

"Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"All human suffering concerns each human being." - Václav Havel

"I also appeal to those who have already done most of their work for society. I hope that the changes you awaited or worked for so long will bring joy and satisfaction into your lives. We need your experience, your wisdom and your love." - Václav Havel

"I still very well remember the moment in 1978 when me and my friends learned that Karol Wojtyla was elected the pope. It was a moment of an immense joy for us. I even think that we were so delighted that we danced for joy." - Václav Havel

"Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements." - Václav Havel

"Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue, but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would be wrong to expect a general remedy from them alone. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all." - Václav Havel

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important." - Vannevar Bush

"Community based software development is now a business, one that holds the potential for Microsoft as for every other company." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"Two things are going on at the same time with the flattening of the world: The relentless quest for efficiency is squeezing some of the fat out of life." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"We’ve been here before. Each century, as we push out the frontiers of human knowledge, work at every level becomes more complex, requiring more pattern recognition and problem solving." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The lower classes of people in Europe may at some future period be much better instructed then they are at present; they may be taught to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at the ale-house; they may live under better and more equal laws than they have hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it possible, though not probable, that they may have more leisure; but it is not in the nature of things, that they can be awarded such a quantity of money or substance, as will allow them all to marry early, in the full confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous family." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street-corners or the opinions of the newspapers. A nation is led by a man who hears more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice. Such is the man who leads a great, free, democratic nation." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis." - Thurgood Marshall

"We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"Fonda was neither wrong nor unconscionable in what she said and did in North Vietnam." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"A writer's first obligation is not to the many-bellied beast but to the many-tongued beast, not to Society, but to Language. Everyone has a stake in the husbandry of Society, but Language is the writer's special charge. A grandiose animal it is, too. If it weren't for Language there wouldn't be Society." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Consider the peaceful repose of the sausage compared with the aggressiveness and violence of bacon." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Now, the line that separates objects from ideas can be pretty twiggy, but let's not unzip that pair of pants. Galileo was right to drop objects rather than ideas off of his tower, and the Care Fest might have been wise to stick with objects, as well. Within the normal range of perception, the behavior of objects can be measured and predicted. Ignoring the possibility that in the wrong hands almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial; ignoring, for the moment, the far more interesting possibility that every object might lead a secret life, it is still safe to say that objects, as we understand them, are relatively stable, whereas ideas are definitely unstable, they not only can be misused, they invite misuse--and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt. " - Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle

"One grad student can do things in an hour that evolution could not do in a billion years." - Cynthia Kenyon

"The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

"If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

"Nor is there any reason to believe that sound conviction will be less permanent in its influence than sophistry and error." - William Godwin

"If we take the universe of fitting, countless coats fit backs, and countless boots fit feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones fit gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions fit realities, and countless truths are valid, tho' no thinker ever thinks them." - William James

"Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short as time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self." - William James

"The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths." - William James

"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in." - William James

"There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end." - William James

"There is a wide difference between general acquaintance and companionship. You may salute a man and exchange compliments with him daily, yet know nothing of his character, his inmost tastes and feelings." - William Matthews

"The free man cannot be long an ignorant man." - William McKinley

"So on he went, and on the way he thought of all the glorious things of yesterday, nought of the price whereat they must be bought, but ever to himself did softly say "no roaming now, my wars are passed away, no long dull days devoid of happiness, when such a love my yearning heart shall bless."" - William Morris