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

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

The toddler is allowed to regulate his own exploratory behavior. What occurs as a result of this entire mechanism is that nature’s imperative to explore the world at large is overwhelmed by the greater imperative to avoid the pain of a broken relationship with the life-giving caregiver. What will be developed in the child is a capacity for deception as he tries to maintain some vestige of integrity while outwardly appearing to conform. Living a lie to survive a lying culture, the child forgets the truth of who he really is.

Behavior | Capacity | Culture | Giving | Integrity | Life | Life | Lying | Nature | Pain | Relationship | Truth | Will | World | Child |

Karl Barth

Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.

Falsehood | Lying | Man | Truth |

Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

Fear | Justify | Men | Speech | Suppression |

Plato NULL

Of all the virtues, is not wisdom the one which the mass of mankind are always claiming, and which most arrouses in them a spirit of contention and lying conceit of wisdom?

Contention | Lying | Mankind | Spirit | Wisdom |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Custom | Lying | Sense | Society | Society |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

Curiosity | Lying |

Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury and wrong pass before their minds, efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.

Genius | Insult | Passion | People | Wrong |

Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh

The gain of lying is nothing else but not to be trusted of any, nor to be believed when we say the truth.

Lying | Nothing | Truth |

Thomas Fuller

Anger is many times more hurtful, than the Injury that caused it.

Anger |

William Hazlitt

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

Art | Force | Hypocrisy | Lying | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Art |

Washington Gladden

Slander, in the strict meaning of the term, comes under the head of lying; but it is a kind of lying which, like its antithesis flattery, ought to be set apart for special censure.

Antithesis | Censure | Flattery | Lying | Meaning | Slander |

Chief Luther Standing Bear

The pressure that has been brought to bear upon the native people, since the cessation of armed conflict, in the attempt to force conformity of custom and habit has caused a reaction more destructive than war, and the injury has not only affected the Indian, but has extended to the white population as well. Tyranny, stupidity, and lack of vision have brought about the situation now alluded to as the “Indian Problem.”

Conformity | Custom | Force | Habit | People | Stupidity | Tyranny | Vision | War |

Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.

Ends | Lying | Man | Respect | Respect |

Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.

Disrespect | Lying | Man | Order | Truth |

Francis Beaumont

It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.

Argument | Silence |

Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright

Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny.

Liberty |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The most common lie is the lie one tells oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.

Lying |