Great Throughts Treasury
This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
V. C. Kitchen, fully Victor C. Kitchen
American Advertising Executive, Author of "Changed by Grace" with A.A. treating his own drinking problem as a moral problem
"In the business of life, Man is the only product. And there is only one direction in which man can possibly develop if he is to make a better living or yield a bigger dividend to himself, to his race, to nature or to God. He must grow in knowledge, wisdom, kindliness and understanding."
"In my old life - I most liked:Myself. Liquor, tobacco and almost every other stimulant, narcotic and form of self-indulgence. Anything which gave me pleasure, possessions, power, position and applause, or pumped up my self-esteem. To be left largely by myself. My wife - because of the comforting and complimentary way she treated me. I hated most: Poverty (for myself). Prohibition."
"The re-direction of old desires and substitution for old stimuli has extended not only throughout my sensual life, but into my social and intellectual life as well. It enters into all of my thinking and into all of my dealings with other people. When, for instance, I only thought about God -- when He existed only in my mind as a belief -- I could reach Him only as an intellectual conclusion. I concluded that there must be some Higher Power to account for all the things taking place in space much as scientists concluded that there must be an atom to account for all the things taking place in physics. "