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

Václav Havel

I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit.

Ideas | Power | Respect | Rights | Unique | Respect |

Václav Havel

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect

Evolution | Humanity | Universe | Old | Think |

Václav Havel

Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community.

Responsibility | World |

Václav Havel

When a man has his heart in the right place and good taste, he can not only do well in politics but is even predetermined for it. If someone is modest and does not yearn for power, he is certainly not ill-equipped to engage in politics; on the contrary, he belongs there. What is needed in politics is not the ability to lie but rather the sensibility to know when, where, how and to whom to say things.

Awareness | Earth | Hypothesis | Understanding | World | Awareness |

Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Aid | Future | Government | Law | Nothing | People | Government | Child |

Tryon Edwards

Contemplation is to knowledge what digestion is to food - the way to get life out of it

Truth | World |

Tryon Edwards

The best rules of rhetoric are, to speak intelligently; speak from the heart; have something to say; say it; and stop when you've done.

Decision | Important | Promptness | Value |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

Man | Meaning | Sound | Understanding |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.… What they [Muslims] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!" That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Need | Search | Suicide | Will |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Only free people can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interest of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Equality | Peace |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.

Equality | Memory | Peace | Right |

Hugh Blair

He who goes no further than bare justice, stops at the beginning of virtue.

Important | Order | Right | Spirit | Truth |

Hugh Blair

Such is the infatuation of self-love, that, though in the general doctrine of the vanity of the world all men agree, yet almost every one flatters himself that his own case is it to be an exception from the common rule.

Good | Sentiment | Simplicity | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |

William James

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.

Human nature | Nature | Psychology |

William Godwin

Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him.

Better | Conduct | Consideration | Family | Father | Improvement | Justice | Justify | Life | Life | Lying | Magic | Man | Sense | Truth | Understanding | Will | Work | Worth | Vice |

William Godwin

What... can be more shameless than for society to make an example of those whom she has goaded to the breach of order, instead of amending her own institutions which, by straining order into tyranny, produced the mischief?

Conduct | Education | Man | Respect | Thinking | Will | Respect |

William Morris

A fearful thing stood at the cloister's end and eyed him for a while, then 'gan to wend adown the cloisters, and began again that rattling, and the moan like fiends in pain. And as it came on towards him, with its teeth the body of a slain goat did it tear, the blood whereof in its hot jaws did seethe, and on its tongue he saw the smoking hair; then his heart sank, and standing trembling there, throughout his mind wild thoughts and fearful ran: "some fiend she was," he said, "the bane of man." yet he abode her still, although his blood curdled within him: the thing dropped the goat, and creeping on, came close to where he stood, and raised its head to him and wrinkled throat. Then he cried out and wildly at her smote, shutting his eyes, and turned and from the place ran swiftly, with a white and ghastly face.

Antiquity | Opposition | Thought | Truth | Thought |

William James

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the

Consciousness | Day | Decision | Psychology | Resolution | Struggle | Time | Will | Think |

William (Morley Punshon) McFee

A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows.

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