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

Ronald A. Heifetz

Thus, authoritative action will tend to reduce stress, while inaction will increase it. This may be true regardless of the content of the action.

Change | Learning | People | Reality | Study | Usefulness | Work | Leadership | Learn |

Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"

The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process.

Future | Pride | Revolution | Strength | Tomorrow | Will | Leadership |

Ronald A. Heifetz

A leader who pushes the authority figure in an attempt to solve important problems should expect the authority figure to strike back, not necessarily from personal motivations but form the community’s pressure on him to maintain equilibrium.

Attention | Distress | Focus | Giving | Light | People | Responsibility | Will | Work | Leadership |

Ronald A. Heifetz

If we leave the value implications of our teaching and practice unaddressed, we encourage people, perhaps unwittingly, to aspire to great influence or high office, regardless of what they do there. We would be on safer ground were we to discard the loaded term leadership altogether and simply describe the dynamics of prominence, power, influence, and historical causation.

Leadership |

S. Truett Cathy

I believe that you can combine biblical principles and good business practices. I testified before Congress…on how to be honest and successful at the same time.

Business | Character | Experience | People | Reflection | Teach | Training | Work | Business |

S. I. Hayakawa, fully Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa

How anybody dresses is indicative of his self-concept. If students are dirty and ragged, it indicates they are not interested in tidying up their intellects either.

Time | Training |

S. L. A. Marshall, Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall

The Japanese were masters at using classical conditioning with their soldiers. Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed in a ditch on their knees with their hands bound behind them. And one by one, a select few Japanese soldiers would go into the ditch and bayonet "their" prisoner to death. This is a horrific way to kill another human being. Up on the bank, countless other young soldiers would cheer them on in their violence. Comparatively few soldiers actually killed in these situations, but by making the others watch and cheer, the Japanese were able to use these kinds of atrocities to classically condition a very large audience to associate pleasure with human death and suffering. Immediately afterwards, the soldiers who had been spectators were treated to sake, the best meal they had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls. The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.

Justify | Men | Mind | Sentiment | Training | Will | Old |

Saint Vincent de Paul

With whose imperfections will you bear, and what insult are you capable of enduring, if a thoughtless word from your own Superior is unbearable?

Fidelity | Will | Work | Leadership |

Samson Raphael Hirsch

Perhaps the day will come when all the things bestowed upon mankind for its benefit and liberation will become corrupted into their very antithesis. Mankind, instead of assuring its members their legitimate rights of development ... will serve them the tear-drenched bread of slaves and the worm-wood of bitterness.... At such time, science, too, will become solely destructive ... will frantically blind itself with its own brightness ....Mankind will vainly exhaust its strength in a blind upsurge of uncurbed desires.

Conscience | Duty | Enlightenment | Father | Knowledge | Mind | Sacred | Training | Child |

Samuel Butler

'Cause grace and virtue are within Prohibited degrees of kin; And therefore no true saint allows They shall be suffer'd to espouse.

Majority | Mother | Opinion | Providence | Training | Will | Wit |

Samuel Butler

Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

Men | Training |

Samuel Smiles

The brave man is an inspiration to the weak, and compels them, as it were, to follow him.

Discipline | Family | Life | Life | Method | Training |

Samuel Smiles

Biographies of great, but especially of good men, are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels - teaching high living, high thinking, and energetic actions for their own and the world's good.

Discipline | Enjoyment | Industry | Progress | Training | Work |

Samuel I. Prime, fully Samuel Irenaeus Prime

Patience and perseverance are never more thoroughly Christian graces than when features of prayer.

Boys | Children | Church | God | Heart | Learning | Lesson | Men | Training | Will | God | Child |

Samuel Ullman

All animals except man know that the ultimate point of life is to enjoy it.

Success | Leadership |

Sidney Madwed

If you want to be truly successful invest in yourself to get the knowledge you need to find your unique factor. When you find it and focus on it and persevere your success will blossom.

Belief | Language | Mind | People | Self | Study | Training | Will |

Sidney Madwed

Never value the valueless. The trick is to know how to recognize it.

Life | Life | Little | Majority | People | Receive | Safe | Self | Training | Will | Wise | Work | Value |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.

Absolute | Day | Training |

Archibald Geikie, fully Sir Archibald Geikie

Geologists have not been slow to admit that they were in error in assuming that they had an eternity of past time for the evolution of the earth's history. They have frankly acknowledged the validity of the physical arguments which go to place more or less definite limits to the antiquity of the earth. They were, on the whole, disposed to acquiesce in the allowance of 100 millions of years granted to them by Lord Kelvin, for the transaction of the whole of the long cycles of geological history. But the physicists have been insatiable and inexorable. As remorseless as Lear's daughters, they have cut down their grant of years by successive slices, until some of them have brought the number to something less than ten millions. In vain have the geologists protested that there must somewhere be a flaw in a line of argument which tends to results so entirely at variance with the strong evidence for a higher antiquity, furnished not only by the geological record, but by the existing races of plants and animals. They have insisted that this evidence is not mere theory or imagination, but is drawn from a multitude of facts which become hopelessly unintelligible unless sufficient time is admitted for the evolution of geological history. They have not been able to disapprove the arguments of the physicists, but they have contended that the physicists have simply ignored the geological arguments as of no account in the discussion.

History | Occupation | Problems | Training |