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

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

Authority | Family | Nature | Politics |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

Nature |

Euripedes NULL

What other creatures are bred so exquisitely and purposefully for mistreatment as women are?

Contradiction | Man | Mortal | Nature | World |

Euripedes NULL

Doth someone say that there be gods above? There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, led by the old false fable, thus deceive you. Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words no undue credence: for I say that kings kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud, and doing thus are happier than those who live calm pious lives day after day. All divinity is built-up from our good and evil luck.

Chance | Change | Rule |

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 |

Eustace Budgell

There is something so gross in the carriage of some wives that they lose their husbandsÂ’ hearts for faults which, if a man has either good-nature or good-breeding, he knows not how to tell them of. I am afraid, indeed, the ladies are generally most faulty in this particular; who at their first giving into love find the way so smooth and pleasant that they fancy it is scarce possible to be tired in it. There is so much nicety and discretion required to keep love alive after marriage, and make conversation still new and agreeable after twenty or thirty years, that I know nothing which seems readily to promote it but an earnest endeavor to please on both sides, and superior good sense on the part of the man.

Change | Desire | Despair | Esteem | Mind | Friendship | Value |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

Change | Defeat | Future | Life | Life | Nothing | Present | Child |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying I must read that, too, when I've the time, replace it and continue the search.

Beauty | Change | Heart | Sadness | Beauty |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

Chance | Family | Impulse | Nature | People |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

Change | Heart | Sadness |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth? (Part One, Chapter XII)

Change | Life | Life | Need | People |

Ezer Weizman

The strikes hurt the daily lives of the citizens badly, and damage public order... We would hope that all is being done to solve the problems.

Change | Will | Think |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity."

Change | Charity | Religion | Temper |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It's a great thing in life to have a place you can't be moved from - too few of them.

Change | Life | Life | Need | People |

Faith Popcorn, born Faith Plotkin

Eighty percent of the consumer dollar is controlled by women, and women earn $4.4 trillion a year,

Change |