Great Throughts Treasury

"The recovery of the soul may depend not on having the right answers but on asking the right questions and carrying them with us for our whole lives. The medical system may need to relinquish a single-minded quest for mastery and allow for the presence of mystery. Who spoke? indeed." - Rachel Naomi Remen

"How did we ever end up with a democracy where challengers to the entrenched corrupt political system in our country cannot get to tens of millions of voters without going through a gate whose key is controlled by the two major parties who want to exclude reforms?" - Ralph Nader

"Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses... In effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them." - Ralph Nader

"Since I was a law student, I have been against the death penalty. It does not deter. It is severely discriminatory against minorities, especially since they're given no competent legal counsel defense in many cases. It's a system that has to be perfect. You cannot execute one innocent person. No system is perfect. And to top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics it, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole." - Ralph Nader

"To shut out legitimate third-party candidates from these debates is to limit the competitive democratic process on which the American electoral system is supposed to be built," - Ralph Nader

"We now have a two-party system that is overwhelmed with its own arrogance and complacency, ... It offers little more than Band-Aids for some of the nation's problems and does not project a sense of confidence among the American people." - Ralph Nader

"As one individual changes, the system changes." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert

"Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out." - Raoul Vaneigem

"To accept as a fact of life that a certain technology will be used for the simple reason that we know how to use it, or that we shall continue to live under a certain social system after it has become too complicated for human understanding, is tantamount to an abdication of intellectual and social responsibility." - René Dubos, fully René Jules Dubos

"This closed system of media-oriented political entertainment continually preempts genuine public dialogue and debate about the issues that most affect people" - Jim Wallis

"The world, and everyone in it is subject to environmental limits. Conventional economics believes that these limits are not there and anything can be substituted if the price is right. Acclaimed environmentalist Richard Heinberg disagrees. He thinks we have reached the end of two centuries of frenetic growth powered by fossil fuels. The current financial crisis is one of the symptoms of a system that is being wrecked, not just by debt but resource depletion and environmental devastation. [Central assertion of his book, "The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality"" - Richard Heinberg

"There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. " - Richard Shaull, fully Reverend M. Richard Shaull

"I confess that for fifteen years my efforts in education, and my hopes of success in establishing a system of national education, have always been associated with the idea of coupling the education of this country with the religious communities which exist." - Richard Cobden

"I should, therefore, be a hypocrite, if I were to say I have any particular repugnance to a system of education coupled with religious instruction." - Richard Cobden

"In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction." - Richard Cobden

"And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilized person today should surely find poisonous." - Richard Dawkins

"Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it." - Richard Dawkins

"The belief that if adaptations are to be treated as 'for the good of something', that something is the gene was the fundamental assumption of my previous book, 'The Selfish Gene'. The present book goes further. To dramatize it a bit, it attempts to free the selfish gene from the individual organism which has been its conceptual prison. The phenotypic effects of a gene are the tools by which it levers itself into the next generation, and these tools may 'extend' far outside the body in which the gene site, even reaching deep into the nervous system of other organisms." - Richard Dawkins

"Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends. Brought up as we have been on the 'good of the species' view of evolution, we naturally think first of liars and deceivers as belonging to different species: predators, prey, parasites, and so on. However, we must expect lies and deceit, and selfish exploitation of communication to arise whenever the interests of the genes of different individuals diverge. This will include individuals of the same species. As we shall see, we must even expect that children will deceive their parents, that husbands will cheat on wives, and that brother will lie to brother." - Richard Dawkins

"Governments have worked hard to get growth started again. But, to the very limited degree that this effort temporarily succeeded in late 2009 and 2010, it did so by ignoring the underlying contradiction at the heart of our entire economic system " - Richard Heinberg

"Unlike most economists, most physical scientists recognize that growth within any functioning, bounded system has to stop sometime." - Richard Heinberg

"Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed, is there any system or cul" - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies

"I think it would be a great tragedy ... if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line. I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"The people's right to change what does not work is one of the greatest principles of our system of government." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"There is an international disease which feeds on the notion that if you have a cause to defend, you can use any means to further your cause, since the end justifies the means. As an international community, we must oppose this notion, whether it be in Canada, in the United States, or anywhere else. No cause justifies violence as long as the system provides for change by peaceful means." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"Well, you can just stop and think of what could happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God... There'd be no power in the world that could even" - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"He was born into, and seems never to have questioned, that English class system which has been so much abused in the present century. Indeed, several governments have announced their intention of abolishing it, and the most recent prime minister to retire showed her egalitarian principles by accepting the title of Baroness Thatcher." - Robertson Davies

"An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement." - Robert Bork, fully Robert Heron Bork

"Now, however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project of dismantling American culture." - Robert Bork, fully Robert Heron Bork

"The gospel comprises indeed, and unfolds, the whole mystery of man's redemption, as far forth as it is necessary to be known for our salvation: and the corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy strives to deduce all the phenomena of nature from adiaphorous matter, and local motion. But neither the fundamental doctrine of Christianity nor that of the powers and effects of matter and motion seems to be more than an epicycle ... of the great and universal system of God's contrivances, and makes but a part of the more general theory of things, knowable by the light of nature, improved by the information of the scriptures: so that both these doctrines... seem to be but members of the universal hypothesis, whose objects I conceive to be the natural counsels, and works of God, so far as they are discoverable by us in this life." - Robert Boyle

"Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it." - Robert M. Pirsig

"The Founders, in particular Thomas Jefferson, were aware that, to make the fledgling republic successful, the populace had to be educated, to give them the tools to differentiate between rational forms of argumentation and antidemocratic logical fallacies and other illegitimate means of persuasion. But setting up an educational system is not enough -- especially when "education" is more and more apt to be defined by the ability to pass a cut-and-dried multiple-choice test. (Odd - conservatives favor these too.) We have to become able to distinguish a real argument from a fallacious one." - Robin Lakoff, fully Robin Tolmach Lakoff

"The introduction of men into the lying in chamber in place of female attendants, has increased the suffering and dangers of childbearing women, and brought multiplied injuries and fatalities upon mothers and children; it violates the sensitive feelings of husbands and wives and causes an untold amount of domestic misery. The unlimited intimacy between a male profession and the female population silently and effectually wears away female delicacy and professional morality, and tends probably more than any other cause in existence, to undermine the foundation of public virtue." - Samuel Gregory

"As a simple example of what We mean, consider the extremely critical problems which exist today in the political and economic spheres. Men are so worried by these things that they give scant thought to those religious concerns, which are the province of the Church's teaching authority. All this is evil, and we are right to condemn it. But this new state of affairs has at least one undeniable advantage: it has eliminated the innumerable obstacles erected by worldly men to impede the Church's freedom of action. We have only to take a cursory glance through the annals of the Church to realize that even those ecumenical councils which are recorded there in letters of gold, were celebrated in the midst of serious difficulties and most distressing circumstances, through the unwarranted intervention of the civil authority. Such intervention was sometimes dictated by a sincere intention on the part of the secular princes to protect the Church's interests, but more often than not their motives were purely political and selfish, and the resultant situation was fraught with spiritual disadvantage and danger. " - Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II

"It may be that we should stop putting so much emphasis in our own minds on the monetary value of a college education and put more emphasis on the intangible social and cultural values to be derived from learning. The time may be coming when we will have to start accepting the idea that education is life, not merely a preparation for it." - Seymour E. Harris

"America has begun a spiritual reawakening. Faith and hope are being restored. Americans are turning back to God. Church attendance is up. Audiences for religious books and broadcasts are growing. And I do believe that he has begun to heal our blessed land." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"Peace is more than just the absence of war. True peace is justice, true peace is freedom. And true peace dictates the recognition of human rights." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"The family has always been the cornerstone of American society. Our families nurture, preserve, and pass on to each succeeding generation the values we share and cherish, values that are the foundation of our freedoms." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"In October 1962 the world avoided nuclear war in part because John F. Kennedy had the capacity to distinguish role from self during the Cuban missile crisis." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"The advantage of formal positions of authority is breadth. The disadvantage is distance from raw and relevant detail." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"May my soul bloom in love for all existence." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

"The occultist sees in the man of today a being in the full swing of evolution. Man is at the same time a fallen God and a God in the becoming." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

"The biggest bursts of speciation that we know about in the history of the earth are soon after great cataclysms, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which create new opportunities, and all sorts of new forms spring up... So, quite often, the reasons for creativity depend on accidents or disasters that prevent the normal habits being carried out." - Rupert Sheldrake, fully Alfred Rupert Sheldrake

"When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it." - Rupert Sheldrake, fully Alfred Rupert Sheldrake

"The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully." - Russell Kirk

"One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

"Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life." - Samuel Alexander

"A school prayer amendment would confer upon public school boards a power the First Amendment now denies to Congress and the states, that is, the power to establish religion." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.

"Rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal." - Samuel Butler