Great Throughts Treasury

"Calamity is man’s true touchstone."

"Man is his own star, and that soul that can be honest, is the only perfect man."

"We need to educate people to the idea that the quality of life is more important than mere length of life. Our cultural tradition holds that life has absolute value, but that is really not good enough anymore. Sometimes, no life is better."

"We ought to love people and use things, the essence of immorality is to love things and use people."

"Ethics critically examines values and how they are to be acted out; but whether they are acted out or not, loyalty to them depends on character or personal quality, and so it follows that the quality of medicine depends on the character of its clinicians."

"If the end does not justify the means, what does? The answer is, obviously, Nothing!"

"Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law."

"The top 10% of the people who are most creative, constructive and thoughtful, do not have much to do with churches. To them the canons of reason come first, making faith secondary and questionable."

"The true opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Hate, bad as it is, at least treats a neighbor as a thou, whereas indifference turns the neighbor into an it, a thing. That is why we may say there is actually one thing worse than evil itself and that is indifference to evil. In human relations the nadir of morality, the lowest point as far as Christian ethics is concerned, is manifest in the phrase, 'I could care less.'"