Great Throughts Treasury

"The majority cannot reason; it has no judgment. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others; it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth." - Emma Goldman

"Mrs. Watts and Mrs. Carson were both in the post office in Victory when the letter came from the Ellisville Institute for the Feeble-Minded of Mississippi. Aimee Slocum, with her hand still full of mail, ran out in front and handed it straight to Mrs. Watts, and they all three read it together. Mrs. Watts held it taut between her pink hands, and Mrs. Carson underscored each line slowly with her thimbled finger. Everyone else in the post office wondered what was up now." - Eudora Welty

"The difficulty that accompanies you is less like the dark than a trusted lantern to see your way by." - Eudora Welty

"If we're trying to set education policy, we have to listen to the education experts." - Eugene Peterson

"Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"For a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life . . . to life itself. I caught a glimpse of something greater than myself." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"I will be an artist or nothing!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I am guilty of believing that the human race can be humanized and enriched in every spiritual inference through the saner and more beneficent processes of peaceful persuasion applied to material problems rather than through wars, riots and bloodshed." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"And so we take a holiday, a vacation, to gain release from this bondage for a space, to stand back from the rush of things and breathe again. But a holiday is a respite, not a cure. The more we need holidays, the more certain it is that the disease has conquered us and not we it. More and more holidays just to get away from it all is a sure sign of a decaying civilization; it was one of the most obvious marks of the breakdown of the Roman empire. It is a symptom that we haven't learned how to live so as to re-create ourselves in our work instead of being sapped by it. A car should always be charging its battery as it runs. If it simply uses up without putting back, it has to go into dock to be recharged. It is not a sign that we are running particularly well if we are constantly needing to go into dock." - Evelyn Underhill

"My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"In the Muslim world, there are many people who have been vocal and we have been very vocal against extremists. But how to win this battle is an ongoing battle. And we must continue to wage the battle for peace." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"The world wants to like America." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"There is a universal element in man which he can assert by so acting as if the purpose of the Universe were also his purpose. It is the function of the supreme ordeals of life to develop in men this power, to give to their life this distinction, this height of dignity, these vast horizons." - Felix Adler

"One devil knows another." - Italian Proverbs

"Revenge a hundred years old has still its milk-teeth." - Italian Proverbs

"Summer is the mother of the poor." - Italian Proverbs

"The same fire purifies gold and consumes straw." - Italian Proverbs

"The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilizations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow in the waters that was soon lost in the West. There he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-Earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"I should think so-in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Makes you late for dinner! I can't see what anybody sees in it." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien