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

Eugene Peterson

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness.

Age | Experience | Future | God | Old age | People | Soul | Spirit | Study | Theology | God | Old |

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

There is only one thing to do — take it to the country!

Incompetence | Life | Life | People | Success | System | War |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

If you let people break your spirit and detour you from your path, then you have not been true to yourself or those you're here to touch, those who believe in you.

Enough | Money | People |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

People |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when black were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedomÂ’s land much less braveryÂ’s home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well.

Thought | Afraid | Thought |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

Care | Life | Life | People | Public | World |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.

Change | Heart | Joy | Looks | People | Rest | Time |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives.

Contempt | People |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery.

Abundance | Death | Fault | Labor | People | Poverty | Struggle | System | Youth | Youth | Child | Fault | Old |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

People | Relationship |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.

People | Spirit |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

People |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

I would no more teach children military training than teach them arson, robbery, or assassination.

Body | Love | People | Friends |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those “liberals” who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.

Life | Life | People | Wrong |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.

People |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they''re scraping the top of the barrel

People |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The capitalist class is represented by the Republican, Democratic, Populist and Prohibition parties, all of which stand for private ownership of the means of production, and the triumph of any one of which will mean continued wage-slavery to the working class.

People | Trouble |

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

Let us pick up again these lost strands and weave them again into the fabric of America, sort out the music from the sounds and again respond to the trumpet and the steady drum.

People |