Great Throughts Treasury

"When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government" - Thomas Paine

"Just surrender to the cycle of things, Give yourself to the waves of the Great Change, And when it is time to go, then simply go, Without any unnecessary fuss" - Ch'ien, fully T'ao Chien or Tao Qian, aka Tao Yuan-ming NULL

"To God - If you have form’d a circle to go into, Go into it yourself, and see how you would do. " - William Blake

"I had a lot of trouble getting [to America]... Every time I hid out on a ship, they found me, or the boat wasn't going anywhere." - Willem de Kooning

"Man’s own form in space – his body – was a private prison; and that it was because of this imprisoning misery – because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy." - Willem de Kooning

"Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does." - Willem de Kooning

"Every time a woman leaves off something she looks better, but every time a man leaves off something he looks worse." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I am not a member of any organized party - I am a Democrat." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Mothers are the only race of people that speak the same tongue. A mother in Manchuria could converse with a mother in Nebraska and never miss a word." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind, that, in other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept." - Wilhelm Reich

"My lovers suffocate me! Crowding my lips, and thick in the pores of my skin, Jostling me through streets and public halls... coming naked to me at night, Crying by day Ahoy from the rocks of the river... swinging and chirping over my head, Calling my name from flowerbeds or vines or tangled underbrush, Or while I swim in the bath....or drink from the pump on the corner... or the curtain is down at the opera... or I glimpse at a woman’s face in the railroad car; Lighting on every moment of my life, Bussing my body with soft and balsamic busses, Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws, namely, the fusion and combination of the conscious will, or partial individual law, with those universal, eternal, unconscious ones which run through all Time, pervade history, prove immortality, give moral purpose to the entire objective world, and the last dignity to human life." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government." - Walter Bagehot

"A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state." - Walter Lippmann

"A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies rather than with analytic, dissecting tendencies. It is consonant also with the conservative holism, with situational thinking rather than abstract thinking, with a certain humanistic organization of knowledge around the actions of human and anthromorphic beings, interiorized persons, rather than around impersonal things." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Cultures vary greatly in their exploitation of the various senses and in the way in which they relate to their conceptual apparatus to the various senses. It has been a commonplace that the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks differed in the value they set on the auditory. The Hebrews tended to think of understanding as a kind of hearing, whereas the Greeks thought of it more as a kind of seeing, although far less exclusively as seeing than post-Cartesian Western man generally has tended to do." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Most persons are distressed, and many depressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhumane pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Oral memory works effectively with "heavy" characters, persons whose deeds are monumental, memorable and commonly public. Thus the noÎtic economy of its nature generates outsize figures, that is, heroic figures, not for romantic reasons or reflectively didactic reasons but for much more basic reasons: to organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or contrived in oral communication, but is natural and even inevitable. In oral verbalization, particularly public verbalization, absolute motionlessness is itself a powerful gesture." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Try to imagine a culture in which no one has ever "looked up" anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression "to look up something" is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"When I first used the term ‘secondary orality,’ I was thinking of the kind of orality you get on radio and television, where oral performance produces effects somewhat like those of ‘primary orality,’ the orality using the unprocessed human voice, particularly in addressing groups, but where the creation of orality is of a new sort. Orality here is produced by technology. Radio and television are ‘secondary’ in the sense that they are technologically powered, demanding the use of writing and other technologies in designing and manufacturing the machines which reproduce voice. They are thus unlike primary orality, which uses no tools or technology at all. Radio and television provide technologized orality. This is what I originally referred to by the term ‘secondary orality.’" - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Where grapholects exist, "correct" grammar and usage are popularly interpreted as the grammar and usage of the grapholect itself to the exclusion of the grammar and usage of the other dialects." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition." - Walter Savage Landor

"There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodopè! that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last." - Walter Savage Landor

"What is companionship where nothing that improves the intellect is communicated, and where the larger heart contracts itself to the model and dimension of the smaller?" - Walter Savage Landor

"If we clearly apperceive the difference between direct apprehension in Whole-mind and relative comprehension by reasoning in mind divided into subject-and-object, all the apparent mysteries will disappear. For that will be found to be the key which unlocks the doors of incomprehension." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"A poet's hope to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"But in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie, mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.'" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Our researchers into Public Opinion are content that he held the proper opinions for the time of year; when there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"The reason can give nothing at all like the response to desire." - Wallace Stevens

"Eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"I am not concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"My Lolita remarked: You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions…" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten, often several times, every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The power of resistance is to set an example: not necessarily to change the person with whom you disagree, but to empower the one who is watching and whose growth is not yet completed, whose path is not at all clear, whose direction is still very much up in the proverbial air." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"We must go to the roots of the problem, to the core of the human psyche, recognizing that collective social action begins with action in individual life. We cannot separate the individual and the society. We each contain the society when we accept the value structure of society, when we accept the priorities worked out for us by governments and the states and the political parties. We are expressions of the collective, repeating the pattern created for us, and we feel happy because we are given physical security, economic security, comfort, leisure, entertainment. We have been trained to be obsessed with the idea of security; the idea of tomorrow haunts us much more than the responsibility for today." - Vimala Thakar

"If you always try to take the high road, then everybody has a chance to benefit." - Vince Gill

"The description and explanation is the best part of music reviewing. There is such a thing, and you know it too, as a gift for judgment. If you have it, you can say anything you like. If you haven't got it, you don't know you haven't got it. And everything you say will be held against you." - Virgil Thomson