Great Throughts Treasury

"The accursed power which stands on Privilege (And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge) Broke ? and Democracy resumed her reign: (Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne)."

"That I grow sour, who only lack delight; That I descend to sneer, who only grieve: That from my depth I should contemn your height; That with my blame my mockery you receive; Huntress and splendor of the woodland night, Diana of this world, do not believe."

"The Barbarian hopes ? and that is the very mark of him ? that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is forever marveling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers."

"That I have loved you rather more than most."

"The Big Baboon is found upon the plains of Cariboo: He goes about with nothing on (A shocking thing to do). But if he dressed respectably and let his whiskers grow, how like this Big Baboon would be to Mister So-and-so!"

"The Cambrian Welsh or Mountain Sheep is of the Ovine race, his conversation is not deep, but then ? observe his face!"

"The capital, the fundamental sin of method [not of creed] in what we call the Modern Scientific Spirit, is the substitution of Numerical Synthesis for Integration. Other accompanying errors of method allied to and in particular proceeding from this capital error shall be noted; but before proceeding to them it is necessary to explain the terms used and to show why the substitution of Numerical Synthesis for Integration as a method of arriving at truth is calamitous, and, far from leading one to truth, debars one from attaining it. We mean by integration that faculty in the human mind whereby it is able to combine an indefinitely large number of impressions [colloquially we say: "an infinite number of impressions"] in order to arrive at reality."

"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine ? but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

"The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue."

"The Devil, having nothing else to do went off to tempt my Lady Poltagrue. My Lady, tempted by a private whim, To his extreme annoyance, tempted him."

"The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerors."

"The essential of the guild-idea is that [of] men pursuing the same form of activity, but only in cooperation limited to the end of preserving the economic freedom-that is the property and livelihood-of each member of the guild."

"The Economic definition of Wealth is subtle and difficult to appreciate, but it is absolutely essential to our study to get it clear at the outset and keep it firmly in mind."

"The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself."

"The evil done by the Modern Scientific Spirit [I wish there were some shorter and simpler name for it] is due to its prestige. It exercises an authority over men through the awe and admiration in which they stand of it. The causes of this prestige are plain enough. Modern science, that addition to human science which has been made since Christendom broke up-----and especially since the definitely anti-Christian movement of the eighteenth century-----has achieved many great things, some of them startling in their novelty, others in their scale, others in their satisfaction of a need; and all these three types of achievement which are sometimes coincident have produced a profound effect upon the modern mind. It is distantly parallel to the effect produced by the wonder-worker, coupled with the effect produced by the hero who slays dragons, with the addition of the effect produced by an enormity."

"The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam."

"The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth."

"The grace of God is courtesy."

"The larger unit can borrow more easily in proportion than the smaller. It can especially tap bank credit more easily and bank credit is, to-day, the chief factor in economic activity of all kinds."

"The issue was between two forces. On the one hand was the instinct which we all have within us, that Europe is Catholic, must live as Catholic, or must die; that in the anarchic religious rebellion was peril of death to our art, our culture, to that from which they proceed, our religious vision. On the other had arisen an intense, fierce, increasing hatred against the Mass, the Blessed Sacrament, the whole transcendental scheme; a hatred such that all who felt it were, in spite of a myriad differences, in common alliance. That hatred fed upon an original popular indignation against the corruption of the clergy, and especially against their financial claims. But the hatred was far older than any such late medieval trouble; it was as old as the presence of the Catholic Church in this world."

"The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man."

"The machine does not control the mind of man, though it affects the mind of man; it is the mind of man that can and should control the machine."

"The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition."

"The Modern Scientific Spirit may be defined as the practice of Science under a false philosophy; that is, the research and establishment of ascertainable facts in the physical world but the application of those facts in an irrational and perverted mood. In other words, the Modern Scientific Spirit is always looking for, and finding, facts in order to misuse them. Begin by remarking an important historical point; the increased interest in physical science which has been the mark of modern times and the increasing use of what are called "scientific methods" in the writing of history and in the critical examination of literary documents, did not produce the false philosophy under which it now works and which is doing all the harm. It found the false philosophy well launched, fell under its influence when young, and has remained captured by it ever since."

"The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie."

"The object of a religion or a philosophy is not to make men wealthy or powerful, but to make them, in the last issue, happy: that is, to fulfil their being."

"The Microbe is so very small you cannot make him out at all, but many sanguine people hope to see him through a microscope."

"The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast."

"The power of the State must be invoked for restoring economic freedom just as it has been invoked for destroying economic freedom."

"The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: all human conflict is ultimately theological? This saying of his (which I carried away with me somewhat bewildered) that all human conflict was ultimately theological: that is, that all wars and revolutions, and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine, was utterly novel to me. To a young man the saying was without meaning: I would almost have said nonsensical, save that I could not attach the idea of folly to Manning. But as I grew older it became a searchlight: with the observation of the world, and with continuous reading of history, it came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that it reached to the very roots of political action; so extended that it covered the whole."

"The prospect of refreshment at the charges of another is an opportunity never to be neglected by men of clear commercial judgment."

"The Politician's corpse was laid away."

"The propaganda of Communism throughout the world, in organization and direction is in the hands of Jewish agents. As for anyone who does not know that the Bolshevist movement in Russia is Jewish, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppression of our deplorable press."

"The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor.""

"The Rich arrived in pairs and also in Rolls Royces; they talked of their affairs in loud and strident voices... The Poor arrived in Fords, whose features they resembled; they laughed to see so many Lords and Ladies all assembled. The People in Between looked underdone and harassed, and out of place and mean, and Horribly embarrassed."

"The Science of Economics does not deal with true happiness nor even with well-being in material things. It deals with a strictly limited field of what is called "Economic Wealth," and if it goes outside its own boundaries it goes wrong."

"The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions."

"The Scorpion is as black as soot, he dearly loves to bite; he is a most unpleasant brute to find in bed, at night."

"The smaller man approaching our modern banking system, which controls all issue of credit and therefore pretty well all our industrial and commercial activities, is not what the controllers of that credit call "interesting." He borrows with difficulty and upon high terms, and must pledge security out of all proportion to that which his richer rival has to put down."

"The society of Christendom and especially of Western Christendom up to the explosion, which we call the Reformation, had been a society of owners: a Proprietarial Society. It was one in which there remained strong bonds between one class and another, and in which there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior, but not, in the main, a distinction between a restricted body of possessors and a main body of destitute at the mercy of the possessors, such as our society has become."

"The sea drives truth into a man like salt."

"The tender Evenlode that makes her meadows hush to hear the sound of waters mingling in the brakes, and binds my heart to English ground. A lovely river, all alone, she lingers in the hills and holds a hundred little towns of stone, forgotten in the western wolds."

"The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved ? to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? ... There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine.... We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice.... Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam's] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril."

"The term "Socialism" becomes a common label for the various theories of attack upon the principle of property, the various policies of communal control at the expense of the family and individual freedom."

"The terror in which English capitalists now stand of organized proletarian resistance gives to the naturally protected craft organizations the power to receive the wages they demand. They act as they have been trained to act by capitalist society, which denies the doctrine of the Just Price, which proclaims work to be an evil and the goal of human endeavor to be the avoidance of it; which puts it up as an ideal that individuals should get as much money as they possibly can out of their fellows by any means in their power."

"The whole art of the political speech is to put 'nothing' into it. It is much more difficult than it sounds."

"The worship of the nation has been able to make men tolerate under its authority what they could never have tolerated from princes: a submission to rule, which, through sumptuary laws on food and drink, through conscription, through a cast-iron system of compulsory instruction for all on State ordered lines, and through a State examination at the gate of every profession, has almost killed the citizen's power to react upon that which controls him, and has almost destroyed that variety which is the mark of life."

"The world is full of double beds And most delightful maidenheads, Which being so, there's no excuse For sodomy or self-abuse."

"The very large units of production and exchange have access to credit on a large scale, sometimes without any cover at all, merely upon the prospect of their success, and always upon terms far easier than are open to their smaller rivals. It is perhaps on this line of easier credit that large capital today does most harm to small capital, drives it out and ruins it."

"Then he added, as men will who are of infinite imagination and crammed with desires, ?My wants are few.'"