Great Throughts Treasury

"Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. Migratory cancer cells are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political. It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!" - Wilhelm Reich

"Cartoon animation offers a medium of storytelling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"When guests come here they're coming because of an integrity we've established over the years. They drive hundreds of miles. I feel a responsibility to the public." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

"Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly lie, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceable-part techniques which printers had worked with for three hundred years. Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word, and, with it, noetic activity." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

"Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"I wanted the influence. In the end I wasn't very good at being a president. I looked out of the window and thought that the man cutting the lawn actually seemed to have more control over what he was doing." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"Our customers should take joy in our products and services." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

"The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside. The aim of this chapter is to provide an outside view—a lens—that I call a system of profound knowledge. It provides a map of theory by which to understand the organizations that we work in. The first step is transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding of the system of profound knowledge. The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people. Once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

"A bourgeois revolution is a revolution which does not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois, i.e., capitalist, social and economic system. A bourgeois revolution expresses the need for the development of capitalism, and far from destroying the foundations of capitalism, it does the opposite, it broadens and deepens them." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labor and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The crisis in Germany has only begun. It will inevitably end in the transfer of political power to the German proletariat. The Russian proletariat is following events with the keenest attention and enthusiasm. Now even the blindest workers in the various countries will see that the Bolsheviks were right in basing their whole tactics on the support of the world workers' revolution." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted — or rather tend to be corrupted — by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The state does not function as we desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and he seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The character of a person is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"My dear fellow citizens: For forty years you have heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many millions of tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you. . . We live in a contaminated moral environment. We have fallen morally ill because we became used to saying one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness have lost their depth and dimensions. . . The previous regime . . . reduced man to a means of production and nature to a tool of production. Thus it attacked both their very essence and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts in some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine." - Václav Havel

"Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous - not just to some people in some circumstances - but to everyone all the time." - Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.

"Real character emerges in the way we meet our routine, everyday obligations." - Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.

"On the haunted staircase of life, art is the only step that doesn't creak." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them." - William James

"Our message is clear. We count. Children count. Everybody counts, so count everybody," - Eleanor Holmes Norton

"Secretary of War Stanton used to get out of patience with Lincoln because he was all the time pardoning men who ought to be shot." - Elihu Root

"We have learned that power is a positive force if it is used for positive purposes." - Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole

"The solitude of the subject results from its relationship with the existing over which it is master. This mastery over existing is the power of beginning, of starting out from itself, starting out from itself neither to act nor to think, but to be." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"Since technology, like gas, will fill any conceptual space provided, Leo Marx, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes it as a “hazardous concept” that may “stifle and obfuscate analytic thinking”. He notes, “Because of its peculiar susceptibility to reification, to being endowed with the magical power of an autonomous entity, technology is a major contributant to that gathering sense… of political impotence. The popularity of the belief that technology is the primary force shaping the postmodern world is a measure of our.. neglect of moral and political standards, in making decisive choices about the direction of society.”" - Evgeny Morozov

"Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a sound body, so the health of the cities depends on the health of the rural areas. The cities, with all their wealth, are merely secondary producers, while primary production, the precondition of all economic life, takes place in the countryside." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"If we do not at least try to manifest something of Creative Charity in our dealings with life, whether by action, thought, or prayer, and do it at our own cost -- if we roll up the talent of love in the nice white napkin of piety and put it safely out of the way, sorry that the world is so hungry and thirsty, so sick and so fettered, and leave it at that: then, even that little talent may be taken from us. We may discover at the crucial moment that we are spiritually bankrupt." - Evelyn Underhill

"Bigotry toward any faith community cannot have any place in civilized society anywhere in the world." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"One devil drives out another." - Italian Proverbs

"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny." - Italian Proverbs

"Time will tell." - Italian Proverbs

"At length the Lady Galadriel released them from her eyes, and she smiled. ?Do not let your hearts be troubled,? she said. ?Tonight you shall sleep in peace.? Then they sighed and felt suddenly weary, as those who have been questioned long and deeply, though no words had been spoken openly." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Do you want to know why men name their penis? So the most important decisions in their life aren't made by a stranger." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Embrace The Power of The Ring! Or embrace your own destruction!" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Folly it may seem. Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him?. We live now upon an island amid many perils, and our hands are more often upon the bowstring than upon the harp" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"For Isildur would not surrender it to Elrond and C¡rdan who stood by. They counselled him to cast it into the fire of Orodruin night at hand... But Isildur refused this counsel, saying: 'This I will have as weregild for my father's death, and my brother's. Was it not I that dealt the Enemy his death-blow?' And the Ring that he held seemed to him exceedingly fair to look on; and he would not suffer it to be destroyed." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Hail, Lord and Steward of Minas Tirith, Denethor son of Ecthelion! I am come with counsel and tidings in this dark hour." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"He was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able swiftly to draw a great war-bow and shoot down a Nazg–l, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Here was one with an air of high nobility such as Aragorn at times revealed, less high perhaps, yet also less incalculable and remote: one of the Kings of Men born into a later time, but touched with the wisdom and sadness of the Eldar Race. He knew now why Beregond spoke his name with love. He was a captain that men would follow, that he would follow, even under the shadow of the black wings." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien