Great Throughts Treasury

"The future never just happened. It was created."

"To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves."

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

"A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse Tung are the effects of numberless causes, the causes of endless effects."

"A proletarian dictatorship is never proletarian."

"Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos."

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."

"Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes."

"As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious. (or Albert Schweitzer)"

"Civilization begins where chaos and insecurity ends."

"Education is the transmission of civilization."

"Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again."

"Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day."

"Four elements constitute Civilization -- economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts."

"From the Medici of Florence and the Fuggers of Augsburg to the Rothschilds of Paris and London and the Morgans of New York, bankers have sat in the councils of governments, financing wars and popes, and occasionally sparking a revolution…."

"History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely."

"History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age."

"History is an excellent teacher with few pupils."

"I shall proceed as rapidly as time and circumstances will permit, hoping that a few of my contemporaries will care to grow old with me while learning."

"In my youth, I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order."

"In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty."

"History reports that “the men who can manage men manage the men who manage only things, and the men who manage money manage all.” So the bankers, watching the trends in agriculture, industry, and trade, inviting and directing the flow of capital, putting our money doubly and trebly to work, controlling loans and interest and enterprise, running great risks to make great gains, rise to the top of the economic pyramid."

"Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice."

"The political machine works because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority."

"The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding."

"Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years."

"Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance."

"Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the laws. Despotism m ay for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it."

"The fear of capitalism compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality."

"One of the lessons of history is that 'nothing' is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."

"The family is the nucleus of civilization."

"Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy."

"The men who can manage men, manage the men who manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all."

"To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy."

"The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history."

"These volumes may help some of our children to understand and enjoy the infinite riches of their inheritance."

"The relative equality of Americans before 1776 has been overwhelmed by a thousand forms of physical, mental, and economic differentiation, so that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is now greater than any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome."

"The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds."

"When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty."