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

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

There is nothing that helps the Socialist Party so much as receiving an occasional deathblow. The oftener it is killed the more active, the more energetic, the more powerful it becomes.

Society | Society |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

Education | Nature |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.

Good | Human race | People | Race | Regard | Religion | System | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Good | Human race | Nature | Race | Reason | Worth |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Asked who was the worst president, he responded, Oh, there were so many of them. Certainly the silliest was Reagan. The most empty. [George H.W.] Bush is in the running for the worst.

Mystery | Need | Will |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Basler finds my Lincoln the 'phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.'... Also, 'more than half the book could never have happened as told.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler's Vidal's Lincoln.

Greed | Justify | Mind | Size |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I have been reading Plotinus all evening. He has the power to sooth me; and I find his sadness curiously comforting. Even when he writes: Life here with the things of earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failure of the wing. The wing has indeed failed. One sinks. Defeat is certain. Even as I write these lines, the lamp wick sputters to an end, and the pool of light in which I sit contracts. Soon the room will be dark. One has always feared that death would be like this. But what else is there? With Julian, the light went, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of timeÂ’s mystery and a manÂ’s love of life.

Fortune | Good |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

People |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The elimination of rent, interest, profit and the production of wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people. That is the demand.

Equality | Philosophy | Principles | Race |

Eugenio Montale

The man of today has inherited a nervous system that cannot stand the current living conditions. Waiting to form the man of tomorrow, today's man reacts to the changed conditions by not objecting to shock but doing mass massificandosi.

Future | Man | System | Will |

Euripedes NULL

Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom.

Children | Love | People | Virtue | Virtue |

Euripedes NULL

In adverse hours the friendship of the good shines most; each prosperous day commands its friends.

Euripedes NULL

I would prefer as friend a good man ignorant than one more clever who is evil too.

Judgment | Understand |

Euripedes NULL

But woe to him, who left to moan, reviews the hours of brightness gone.

Necessity | Think |

Euripedes NULL

Enjoy yourself, drink, call the life you live today your own-but only that; the rest belongs to chance.

Advice | Haste | Luck | Luck |

Euripedes NULL

I hate it in friends when they come too late to help.

Aid | Care | Health | Man | Wealth |

Eustace Budgell

We are generally so much pleased with any little accomplishments, either of body or mind, which have once made us remarkable in the world, that we endeavor to persuade ourselves it is not in the power of time to rob us of them. We are eternally pursuing the same methods which first procured us the applauses of mankind. It is from this notion that an author writes on, though he is come to dotage; without ever considering that his memory is impaired, and that he hath lost that life, and those spirits, which formerly raised his fancy and fired his imagination. The same folly hinders a man from submitting his behavior to his age, and makes Clodius, who was a celebrated dancer at five-and-twenty, still love to hobble in a minuet, though he is past threescore. It is this, in a word, which fills the town with elderly fops and superannuated coquettes.

Human nature | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | Will |

Euripedes NULL

Of all the evils that infest a state, a tyrant is the greatest; his sole will commands the laws, and lords it over them.

Daughter | Evil | Father | God | Gold | Good | Heaven | Mind | Nature | Nothing | Order | Wife | Will | God |