Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Henry Ward Beecher

Do not be afraid because the community teems with excitement. Silence and death are dreadful. The rush of life, the vigor of earnest men, the conflict of realities, invigorate, cleanse, and establish the truth.

Death | Excitement | Life | Life | Men | Silence | Truth | Afraid |

Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.

Business | Enough | Man | Money |

Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

The vision of a world community based on justice, not power, is the necessity of our age.

Age | Justice | Necessity | Power | Vision | World |

Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

[Central Intelligence Agency] analysts were only too aware that no one has ever been penalized for not having foreseen an opportunity, but that many careers have been blighted for not predicting a risk. Therefore the intelligence community has always been tempted to forecast dire consequences for any conceivable course of action, an attitude that encourages paralysis rather than adventurism.

Action | Consequences | Intelligence | Opportunity | Risk |

Henry Ward Beecher

Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man’s life happens to be passed. It shows how much good men require of us.

Character | Conduct | Good | Life | Life | Man | Men | Morality |

Henry Ward Beecher

Morality is character and conduct, such as is required by the circle or community in which the man’s life happens to be placed.

Character | Conduct | Life | Life | Man | Morality |

Immanuel Kant

Act only on that maxim [intention] whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature. Always act so as to treat humanity, whether in yourself or in others, as an end in itself, never merely as a means. Act always as if to bring about, and as a member of, a Kingdom of Ends [that is, an ideal community in which everyone is always moral].

Action | Ends | Humanity | Intention | Law | Means | Nature | Time | Will |

Jeremy Bentham

I recognize, as the all-comprehensive, and only right and proper end of Government, the greatest happiness of the members of the community in question: the greatest happiness - of all of them, without exception , in so far as possible.: the greatest happiness of the greatest number of them...

Government | Question | Right | Happiness |

John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"

In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.

Public |

Jonathan Edwards

A man of a right spirit is not a man of narrow and private views, but is greatly interested and concerned for the good of the community to which he belongs, and particularly of the city or village in which he resides, and for the true welfare of the society of which he is a member.

Good | Man | Right | Society | Spirit | Society |

John Stuart Mill

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism... I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.

Force | Individuality | Right |

John Stuart Mill

Customs are made for customary circumstances; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism. [And] I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.

Choice | Circumstances | Conduct | Conformity | Eccentricity | Force | Individuality | Nature | Peculiarity | People | Pleasure | Right | Taste | Thought | Following | Thought |

M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck

The degree to which we can develop world community and thereby save our skins is going to depend primarily on the degree to which we human beings can learn to empty ourselves.

World | Learn |

Joseph Campbell

Mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time. For all the symbolic narratives, images, rites, and festivals by which life within the cultural monad is controlled and defined are of the order of the way of art. Their effect, therefore, is to wake the intellect to realizations equivalent to those of the insights that produced them.

Adolescence | Age | Art | Birth | Childhood | Control | Death | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Old age | Order | Rites | System | Time | World | Intellect | Old |

M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck

There can be no vulnerability without risk; and there can be no community without vulnerability; and there can be no peace - ultimately no life - without community.

Life | Life | Peace | Risk |

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

Science could not survive without a community sharing scientific values. Moral systems do not continue unless individuals subscribe to a common set of ethics. Values are so ephemeral that they require the joining psychic input of a group to retain their hold on each person’s attention. They may be created by individuals, but they must be maintained by the collectivity.

Attention | Ethics | Science |

Morrie Schwartz, fully Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning in your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

Important | Life | Life | Meaning | People | Purpose | Purpose | Wrong | Think |

Plato NULL

There can be no happiness either for the community or for the individual man, unless he passes his life under the rule of righteousness with the guidance of wisdom.

Guidance | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Righteousness | Rule | Wisdom | Guidance | Happiness |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The classes of citizens are three. The rich are useless, always lusting after more. Those who have not, and live in want, are a menace, ridden with envy and fooled by demagogues; their malice stings the owners. Of the three, the middle part saves cities: it guards the order a community establishes.

Envy | Malice | Order |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest and supreme and the most comprehensive community is that which is composed of men and God, and that from God have descended the seeds not only to my father and grandfather, but to all beings which are generated on the earth and are produced... why should not such a man call himself a citizen of the world?

Earth | Father | God | Man | Men | World | God |