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

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

The Family of Man is more than three billion strong. It lives in more than one hundred nations. Most of its members are not white. Most of them are not Christians. Most of them know nothing about free enterprise, of due process of law or the Australian ballot.

Family | Free enterprise | Law | Man | Nations | Nothing | Wisdom |

Abbott Elliot Kittredge

I believe that the fewer the laws in a home the better; but there is one law which should be as plainly understood as the shining of the sun is visible at noonday, and that is, implicit and instantaneous obedience from the child to the parent, not only for the peace of the home, but for the highest good of the child.

Better | Good | Law | Obedience | Peace | Wisdom | Child |

John Locke

Repentance is a hearty sorrow for our past misdeeds, and is a sincere resolution and endeavor, to the utmost of our power, to conform all our actions to the law of God. It does not consist in one single act of sorrow, but in doing works meet for repentance; in a sincere obedience to the law of Christ for the remainder of our lives.

God | Law | Obedience | Past | Power | Repentance | Resolution | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Abraham Lincoln

Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children's liberty.

Children | Father | Law | Liberty | Man | Wisdom |

Valerius Maximus

To love our parents is the first law of nature.

Law | Love | Nature | Parents | Wisdom |

Jacques Maritain

The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time.

Absolute | Association | Body | Choice | Conduct | Destiny | Dignity | Existence | Family | Freedom | God | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Order | Perfection | Personal freedom | Respect | Right | Rights | Society | Time | Will | Wisdom | Society | Respect | God | Value |

Abraham Lincoln

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

Law | Wisdom |

John Locke

Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.

Ends | Law | Tyranny | Wisdom |

Neil MacCormick, Sir Donald Neil MacCormick

When we say that law ‘embodies’ values we are talking metaphorically. What does it mean? Values are only ‘embodied’ in law in the sense that and to the extent that human beings approve of the laws they have because of the state of affairs they are supposed to secure, being states of affairs which are on some ground deemed just or otherwise good. This need not be articulated at all.

Good | Law | Need | Sense | Talking | Wisdom |

James McCosh

As ages roll on there is doubtless a progression in human nature. The intellectual comes to rule the physical, and the moral claims to subordinate both. It is no longer strength of body that prevails, but strength of mind; while the law of God proclaims itself superior to both.

Body | God | Human nature | Law | Mind | Nature | Rule | Strength | Wisdom | God |

Jane Porter

Virtue is despotic; life, reputation, every earthly good, must be surrendered at her voice. The law may seem hard, but it is the guardian of what it commands: and is the only sure defence of happiness.

Good | Law | Life | Life | Reputation | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival

Every thing existing on the physical plain is an exteriorization of a thought which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought and in accordance with that one's responsibility at the conjunction of time, condition and place. This law of thought is Destiny. Thinking is the basic factor in shaping human destiny. The machinery of the law is nature. The purpose of the universe is to make all units of matter conscious of progressively higher degrees.

Destiny | Law | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Thinking | Thought | Time | Universe | Wisdom | Thought |

John Powell, fully Sir John Powell

Consider the reason of the case, for nothing is law that is not reason.

Law | Nothing | Reason | Wisdom |

J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine

There is something operative in man that transcends the law of matter and, therefore, by definition, a nonphysical or spiritual law is made manifest... This new world of the mind, represented and perhaps only suggested by the psi operations already identified, may very well, through further exploration, expand into an order of significance for a spiritual universe beyond the dreams of religion’s own prophets and mystics.

Dreams | Law | Man | Mind | Order | Religion | Universe | Wisdom | World |

Roscoe Pound, fully Nathan Roscoe Pound

The law must be stable, but it must not stand still.

Law | Wisdom |

Jean Racine, baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine

Small crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness.

Crime | Extreme | Innocence | Law | Rights | Sacred | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |