Great Throughts Treasury

"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice."

"Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river."

"Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life."

"Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity."

"Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change"

"Death is an incident in an extended existence."

"Decision angels and the rule of saints deny and curse and set prayers at Baruch Spinoza, with the consent sect holy whole, and in the presence of Bibles with Alstmih and thirteen Namusa started out, monument him curse and all curses recorded in the book of the law, but not … cursed, day and night, cursed at him going The basis of return transportation, and in his sleep and Sabha, and exit and entry, and we hope that God is not covered by amnesty never and descend upon the wrath of God and indignation always, and holds all the curses recorded in the book of the law, and ask God to save first obedience of you and save them, and to Aathdt one with a word, or related in writing, and to provides little to him one help or favor, and to Aieih one with him under one roof, and to Aigterb one from him at a distance of four arms, and that does not read one thing was by his pen or dictated his tongue."

"Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative"

"Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old."

"Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold."

"Education is the transmission of civilization."

"Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles."

"Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way."

"Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it."

"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."

"History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely."

"History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice."

"Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand unshaken when I fall; that I may know the shattered fragments of my song will come at last to finer melody in you; that I may tell my heart that you begin where passing I leave off, and fathom more."

"History is subject to geology. Every day the sea encroaches somewhere upon the land, or the land upon the sea; cities disappear under the water, and sunken cathedrals ring their melancholy bells. Mountains rise and fall in the rhythm of emergence and erosion; rivers swell and flood, or dry up, or change their course; valleys become deserts, and is the muses becomes straits. To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is a fluid form, and man moves upon it as insecurely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ."

"I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income."

"I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets."

"How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself."

"Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths:"

"I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality."

"If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life."

"I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order."

"If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous."

"If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all."

"If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both, combine external modesty with internal pride."

"If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all."

"In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line."

"India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all."

"India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings."

"In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever."

"It is an illuminating sign of beauty's generation by desire, that when the object of desire is securely won, the sense of its beauty languishes; few men are philosopher enough to desire what they have, and fewer still can find beauty in what no longer stirs desire."

"Inquiry is fatal to certainty."

"No man can frequent the company of the great philosophers without changing his mind and widening his views on a thousand vital points."

"It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such unquestionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her in the future."

"It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world."

"It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that 'You can't fool all the people all the time,' but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country."

"Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law."

"Man, not the earth, makes civilization."

"Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions"

"Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all. Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India....This is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up like a new intellectual continent to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusive Western thing."

"Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal."

"Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way."

"One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages."

"Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say."

"Other studies may tell us how man might behave, or how he should behave; history tells us how he has behaved for six thousand years. One who knows that record is in large measure protected in advance against the delusions and disillusionments of his time."

"Nothing is new except arrangement."