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

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

They [liberal newsmen] were people who believed a number of things. Foremost among them was the belief that peace could be perserved, World War III could be averted only by conciliating the Soviet Union. For this no price was too high to pay, including the price of willful historical self-delusion.… Hence like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for others.

History | Nations | Society | Society |

Wilhelm Reich

What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That's what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You're a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don't want the thorns of my roses. Haven't you too, little psychiatrist, been cracking silly jokes about me? Haven't you ridiculed me as the prophet of bigger and better orgasms? Have you never heard the whimpering of a young wife whose body has been desecrated by an impotent husband? Or the anguished cry of an adolescent bursting with unfulfilled love? Does your security still mean more to you than your patient? How long will you go on valuing your respectability above your medical mission? How long will you refuse to see that your pussyfooting procrastination is costing millions their lives?

Democracy | Future | History | Means | Order | Organic | People | Politics | Responsibility | Society | Time | Work | Society |

Wilhelm Reich

In the course of thousands of years of mechanical development, the mechanistic concept, from generation to generation, has anchored itself deeply in man’s biological system. In so doing, it actually has altered human functioning in the sense of the machine-like. In the process of killing his genital function, man has become biologically rigid. He has armored himself against that which is natural and spontaneous within him, he has lost contact with the biological function of self-regulation and is filled with a strong fear of that which is alive and free.

History | Will |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

To those for whom the intellect alone has force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that there is something greater about man than his ability to add and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul. Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian witness. They still hear it, whenever it truly reaches their ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers to them that each soul is individually responsible to God, that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false invulnerable truth.

History | Knowing | Little | Reality |

Wilhelm Reich

Every physician, shoemaker, mechanic or educator must know his shortcomings if he is to do his work and make his living. For some decades, you have begun to play a governing role on this earth. It is on your thinking and your actions that the future of humanity depends. But your teachers and masters do not tell you how you really think and are; nobody dares to voice the one criticism of you which could make you capable of governing your own fate. You are "free" only in one sense: free from education in governing your life yourself, free from self-criticism.

History | Meaning |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

When you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wiser.

Battle | Good | History | Right |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.

History | Life | Life | Mankind | Men | Unique |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Tenderly, be not impatient, (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, Strong is your hold O love.)

Death | Deeds | History | Martyrs | Study | Deeds | Old |

Walter Lippmann

Because courage consists in transcending normal fears, the highest kind of courage is cold courage; that is to say, courage in which the danger has been fully realized and there is no emotional excitement to conceal the danger.

History | Human nature | Nature | Universe |

Walter Brueggemann

It may be the work of the church to name empire for what it is.

History | Imagination | People | Promise | Work |

Walter Brueggemann

The new righteousness offered in the gospel occurs in a world where people like us are angry enough to kill. People who are angry enough to kill do come to church, do approach God, do bring an offering.

History | Individual | Language |

Walter Bagehot

The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy promises its votaries—the pleasure of being always right, and always reasoning—without ever being bound to look at anything.

Difficulty | History |

Walter Bagehot

The best reason why monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government: the mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

Art | History | Light | Rest | Art |

Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

What functionally literate human beings really are: beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.

Growth | History | Knowledge | Will | World |

Walter Savage Landor

Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command.

Events | History |

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

If someone starts talking to you about beta, zip up your pocketbook.

History | Past | People |

Washington Irving

Man's history is a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

History |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

You have everything you need for complete peace and total happiness right now.

History | Unique |

Wei Jingsheng or Jing-sheng

We must ask the high cadres ... When you suppressed the rights of others to express freely their political views, did you secure your own?

History | Martyrs |

Wendell Berry

It is possible, I think, to say that... agriculture formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.

Business | Failure | Faith | Greed | History | Hope | Indignation | Land | Life | Life | Obligation | People | Present | Right | Study | Failure | Business |