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

Henry Giles

Friendship, like love, is self-forgetful. The only inequality is knows is one that exalts the object, and humbles self.

Character | Inequality | Love | Object | Self |

William Ewart Gladstone

Justice delayed, is justice denied.

Character | Justice |

J. G. Fichte, fully Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Our doctrine here is therefore that all reality... is brought forth solely by the imagination.

Character | Doctrine | Imagination | Reality | Wisdom |

Vardis Fisher, fully Vardis Alvero Fisher

Do people love truth? On the contrary, mankind has employed its subtlest ingenuity and intelligence in efforts to evade or conceal it... Do human beings love justice? The sordid travesties in our courts year after year suggest that they love justice only for themselves. Do they love peace? Can anyone seriously ask the question? Do they love freedom? Only for those who share their views. Love of peace, freedom, justice, truth - this is a myth that has been created by the folk mind, and if the artist does not look behind the myth to the reality, he will indeed wander amid the phantoms which he creates.

Character | Freedom | Ingenuity | Intelligence | Justice | Love | Mankind | Mind | Myth | Peace | People | Question | Reality | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Ingenuity |

John P. Grier

The biggest gap in the world is the gap between the justice of a cause and the motives of the people pushing it.

Cause | Character | Justice | Motives | People | World |

Philip Henry

Sorrow is sin’s echo, and as the echo answers the voice best where there are broken walls and ruined buildings to return it, so is sorrow when reverberated by a broken ruined heart.

Character | Heart | Sin | Sorrow |

Thomas Hobbes

To this war of every man, against every man, this is also consequent that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice, and injustice, are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his sense, and passions. They are qualities, that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thing distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it.

Body | Character | Force | Fraud | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Law | Man | Men | Mind | Nothing | Power | Qualities | Right | Sense | Society | Solitude | War | World | Wrong |

David Hume

The only difference betwixt the natural vices and justice lies in this, that the good, which results from the former, arises from every single act, and is the object of some natural passion: whereas a single act of justice, consider’d in itself, may often be contrary to the public good; and ‘tis only the concurrence of mankind, in a general scheme or system of action, which is advantageous.

Action | Character | Good | Justice | Mankind | Object | Passion | Public | System |

William Dean Howells

It is the still voice that the soul heeds; not the deafening blasts of doom.

Character | Soul |

Anna Jameson

Never was the voice of conscience silenced without retribution.

Character | Conscience |

Walter Savage Landor

Delay of justice is injustice.

Character | Delay | Injustice | Injustice | Justice |

Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva

Justice is immortal, eternal, and immutable, like God Himself; and the development of law is only then a progress when it is directed towards those principles which always like Him, are eternal; and whenever prejudice of error succeeds in establishing in customary law any doctrine contrary to eternal justice.

Character | Doctrine | Error | Eternal | God | Justice | Law | Prejudice | Principles | Progress | God |

Rufus Jones, fully Rufus Matthew Jones

[Conscience] is the voice of our ideal self, our complete self, our real self, laying its call upon the will.

Character | Conscience | Self | Will |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.

Character | God | Silence | Wisdom |

Eda J. LeShan

We are not asking our children to do their own best but to be the best. Education is in danger of becoming a religion based on fear; its doctrine is to compete. The majority of our children are being led to believe that they are doomed to failure in a world which has room only for those at the top.

Character | Children | Danger | Doctrine | Education | Failure | Fear | Majority | Religion | World | Danger | Failure |

Alexander Maclaren

A man who has not learned to say “no” - who is not resolved that he will take God’s way in spite of every dog that can bark at him, in spite of every silvery voice that can woo him aside - will be a weak and wretched man till he dies.

Character | God | Man | Will |