Great Throughts Treasury

"Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking."

"Geniuses are just people who had good mothers."

"God, to me, it seems is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper."

"God's truth and faithfulness "are a great deep." They resemble the ocean itself; always there--vast, fathomless, sublime, the same in its majesty, its inexhaustible fullness, yesterday, today, and forever; the same in calm and storm, by day and by night; changeless while generations come and pass; everlasting while ages are rolling away."

"Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead."

"Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery."

"Hide what you have and reveal what you haven’t."

"How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else."

"Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat."

"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons."

"Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation."

"Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider. . . . Realistic, comprehensively responsible, omni-system-considerate, unselfish thinking on the part of humans does absolutely affect human destiny."

"I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth. "

"I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly."

"I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless."

"I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual . . . the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative . . . the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions."

"I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. "

"I am not a thing, a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe."

"I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced."

"I do not look upon human beings as good or bad. I don't think of my feet as a right foot and a wrong foot. ... I am a student of the effectiveness of the technological evolution in its all unexpected alterations of the preoccupations of humanity and in its all unexpected alterings of human behaviors and prospects."

"I find people only listen to you when they ask you to talk to them."

"I find the audiences very excited. But then they come and say to me, your optimism has brushed off on me. I didn't know we had an option. I feel so much better. They say, your optimism. And I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about."

"I have been a deliberate half-century-fused inciter of a cool-headed, natural, gestation-rate-paced revolution, armed with physically demonstrable livingry levers with which altogether to elevate all humanity to realization of an inherently sustainable, satisfactory-to-all, ever higher standard of living. Critical threshold-crossing of the inevitable revolution is already underway."

"I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?"

"I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe. "

"I look for what needs to be done! After all, that's how the universe designs itself."

"I never try to tell anybody else what to do, number one. And number two, I think that's what the individual is all about. Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule that I can give out, any command. We're all on the frontier, we're all in a great mystery — incredibly mysterious. Each one possesses exactly what each one is working out, and what each one works out relates to their particular set of circumstances of any one day, or any one place around the world."

"I set about fifty-five years ago (1927) to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity."

"I think it's absolutely touch-and-go whether we're going to make it. But the point is, for me to tell you that you have an option is not to be optimistic... Time and again, of course I am running into millions who don't know we have the option, because it's invisible, and I feel I have tremendous responsibility. So when people ask me to come and talk to them, I do my best to let them know they do have the option. Of course they're pessimistic, not knowing that."

"I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics."

"I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries. "

"If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference."

"If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them."

"If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do...How would I be? What would I do?"

"If you are the master, be sometimes blind, if you are the servant, be sometimes deaf."

"If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. "

"I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience."

"I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely."

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete."

"In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the bright intellectuals and the physically creative into specialist careers. The powerful reserved for themselves the far easier, because innate, comprehensive functioning. All one needs to do is to discover how self-perpetuating is this disease of specialization is to witness the inter-departmental battling for educational funds and the concomitant jealous guarding of the various specializations assigned to a department's salaried experts on each subject in any university."

"Indeed, a little skill in antiquity inclines a man to Popery; but depth in that study brings him about again to our religion."

"Initiative can neither be created nor delegated. It can only spring from the self-determining individual, who decides that the wisdom of others is not always better than his own."

"Integrity is the essence of everything successful. "

"Integrity of the individual is what we're being judged for and if we are not passing that examination, we don't really have the guts, we'll blow ourselves up. It will be all over. I think it's all the difference in the world."

"It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction."

"It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership. "

"It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?"

"It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems."

"It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate."

"It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as matter, find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science. "