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

Daniel Bell

Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon. Such freedom comes from the fact that the axial principle of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the “self” in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment. And in its search, there is a denial of any limits or boundaries to experience. It is a reaching out for all experience; nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored.

Culture | Experience | Freedom | Fulfillment | Nothing | Order | Search | Self | Self-realization | Style | World |

Elbert Green Hubbard

Culture is only culture when the owner is not aware of its existence. Capture culture, hog-tie it, and clap your brand upon it, and you find the shock has killed the thing you loved. You can brand a steer, but you cannot brand deer.

Culture | Existence |

Eric Hoffer

Man started out as a "weak thing of the world" and evolved "to confound the things that are mighty." And within the human species, too, the weak often develop aptitudes and devises which enable them not only to survive but to prevail over the strong. Indeed, the formidableness of the human species stems from the survival of its weak. Were it not for the compassion that moves us to care for the sick, the crippled, and the old there would probably would have been neither culture or civilization. The crippled warrior who had to stay behind while the manhood of the tribe went out to war was the storyteller, teacher, and artisan. The old and the sick had a hand in the development of the arts of healing and of cooking. One thinks of the venerable sage, the unhinged medicine man, the epileptic prophet, the blind bard, and the witty hunchback and dwarf.

Care | Civilization | Compassion | Culture | Man | Survival | War | World | Old |

Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Civilization | Culture | Life | Life | Means | Men |

Esther Schaeffer

A school where you've got good character education is one where the culture of the school puts a high premium on respect, honesty, and kids being responsible for their actions and adults doing the same.

Character | Culture | Education | Good | Honesty | Respect |

Horace Greeley

Men who have great riches and little culture rush into business, because they are weary of themselves.

Business | Culture | Little | Men | Riches | Riches |

Immanuel Kant

Fine art... is a mode of representation which is intrinsically final, and which, although devoid of an end, has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interests of social communication.

Art | Culture |

Jack Kornfield

One of the difficulties with our busy modern culture is that we don’t take time to listen to our hearts. Our immediate problems, our plans and thoughts, fill our minds and, lost in thinking, we lose our connection to our hearts and our true nature.

Culture | Nature | Problems | Thinking | Time |

Immanuel Kant

I will... venture to assume that as the human race is continually advancing in civilization and culture as its natural purpose, so it is continually making progress for the better in relation to the moral end of its existence, and that this progress although it maybe sometimes interrupted, will never be entirely broken off or stopped.

Better | Civilization | Culture | Existence | Human race | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Will |

Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

To the mother alone it has been given, that her soul during the nine months should touch the soul of the child, and impose upon it predispositions to truth, gentleness, goodness, the culture of which precious germs she should complete in the light of day, after having sown them in the mysterious mysteries of her maternity.

Culture | Day | Gentleness | Light | Mother | Soul | Truth |

John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"

The culture of organization runs strongly to the shifting of problems to others – to an escape from personal mental effort and responsibility. This, in turns, becomes the larger public attitude. It is for others to do the worrying, take the action. In the world of the great organization, problems are not solved but passed on. And there is a further effect. The delegation process just cited adds ineluctably to the layers of command and to the prestige associated with command. That prestige is regularly measured by the number of individual subordinates.

Action | Culture | Effort | Individual | Organization | Problems | Public | Responsibility | World |

Judith A. Boss

Being morally good, for the majority of Americans, means following the norms and values of their society or culture - whether this be their peer culture, their church, their country, or a combination of these. The theory that morality is relative to societal norms is known in moral philosophy as cultural relativism. Many others claim that morality is relative to the individual and is different for every person depending on what they feel. This theory is known in philosophy as ethical subjectivism.

Church | Culture | Good | Individual | Majority | Means | Morality | Philosophy | Society | Society | Following |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

A society – the product of socialization – is made of spontaneous nurturing and love, while culture can be quiet hate, which can lead, sooner or later, to a child’s subtle or flagrant rebellion.

Culture | Hate | Love | Quiet | Rebellion | Society | Society |

Laurens van der Post

Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future.

Compassion | Culture | Future | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Spirit | Vision |

Karl Barth

Anti-Semitism in any form is a barbaric insult to our culture and our civilization, which have been moulded by Christianity, and as a breakdown of Christian values, which have become confused and lacking in humanity.

Anti-semitism | Civilization | Culture | Humanity | Insult | Insult |

Lewis Thomas

We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health and longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.

Better | Culture | Health | Hope | Leisure | Need | Science | Survival | Technology | Wisdom |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

Our children’s growth: joyful learning or cultural conditioning? A child’s socialization, which can be characterized as learning in its most complete form, encouraging reflective thought, is instinctual and arises spontaneously on its own. Culture is something quite the opposite: an intellectual, arbitrary conditioning and enhancement of automatic reflexes that must be both induced and enforced.

Children | Culture | Growth | Learning | Thought |

Margaret Mead

The capacity for friendship usually goes with highly developed civilizations. The ability to cultivate people differs by culture and class; but on the whole, educated people have more ways to make friends.

Ability | Capacity | Culture | People | Friendship |

Marilyn Ferguson

We do not make use of our freedom. We have given away the fundamental freedom to visualize and shape our world. We allow actors, advertisers and politicians to dream for us. And a culture that does not dream is not free.

Culture | Freedom | World |