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

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

Authority | Church | Conscience | Critic | Will | Wisdom | Zeal |

Francis Lieber

Great truths always dwell a long time with small minorities, and the real voice of God is often that which rises above the masses, not that which follows them.

God | Time | Wisdom | God | Truths |

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

I am a man of peace, God knows how I love peace; but I hope I shall never be such a coward as to mistake oppression for peace.

God | Hope | Love | Man | Mistake | Oppression | Peace | Wisdom | God |

Roger Manwood, fully Sir Roger Manwood

As touching corporations, that they were invisible, immortal and that they had no soul, therefor no supoena lieth against them, because they have no conscience or soul.

Conscience | Soul | Wisdom |

Alexander Maclaren

Do not let the loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your wills in equipoise till God’s hand gives the impulse and direction.

Care | God | Impatience | Impulse | Wills | Wisdom | God |

Alexander Maclaren

As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being. God speaks for the most pat in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard.

God | Joy | Little | Love | Silence | Soul | Truth | Wills | Wisdom | God |

Frederick Mayer

More than any other organization in history, the U.N. symbolizes the collective conscience of mankind.

Conscience | History | Mankind | Organization | Wisdom |

Newton Minow, fully Newton Norman Minow

Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today’s world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind’s benefit, so will history decide whether today’s broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or debase them.

Age | Destroy | History | Mankind | People | Space | Television | Will | Wisdom | World |

Lewis Namier, fully Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier, aka Ludwik Niemirowski, born Ludvik Bernstein

It is a woeful mistake to suppose that the educated are kinder or more tolerant: education creates vested interests, and renders the beneficiaries acutely jealous and very vocal.

Education | Mistake | Wisdom |

Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto

All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

Awareness | Conscience | Destiny | Difficulty | Isolation | Order | Rites | Silence | Solitude | Wisdom | Awareness |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

God | Love | Man | Mistake | Wisdom | Woman | God |

Guiseppe Mazzini

Music is the harmonious voice of creation, an echo of the invisible world, one note of the divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound.

Day | Music | Sound | Universe | Wisdom | World |

Harvey Milk

Let’s make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with our neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living. to sit on the front steps - whether it’s a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city - and talk to our neighbors is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch make-believe world in not-quite living color.

Important | Life | Life | Mistake | Wisdom | World | Understand |

I. L. Peretz, fully Isaac Leib Peretz, aka Yitskhok Leybush Pertez

The voice is on the borderline between the physical and the spiritual.

Wisdom |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our powers of judgment are more completely exposed by being overpraised than by being unjustly underestimated.

Blame | Conscience | Judgment | Praise | Reason | Wisdom |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The philosopher has to be the bad conscience of his age.

Age | Conscience | Wisdom |

Cynthia Ozick

I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers, they are gossips.

Fallacy | Ideas | Mind | Mistake | People | Thinkers | Wisdom | Afraid |

Francis Quarles

Demean thyself more warily in thy study than in the street. If thy public actions have a hundred witnesses, thy private have a thousand. The multitude looks but upon thy actions; thy conscience looks into them: the multitude may chance to excuse thee, if not acquire thee; thy conscience will accuse thee, if not condemn thee.

Chance | Conscience | Looks | Public | Study | Will | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only to listen too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body, which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray.

Body | Conscience | Instinct | Man | Nature | Reason | Right | Soul | Wisdom | Afraid |