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

Thomas Jefferson

The sheep are happier of themselves than under the care of a wolf.

Government | Style | Submission | Title | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

Ends | Law | Majority | Sacred | Society | Will | Society |

Thomas Jefferson

We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. We can never be safe till this is done.

Liberty | Means | Precedent | Public | Society | Time | Will | Society |

Thomas Jefferson

Where thought is free in its range, we need never fear to hazard what is good in itself.

Men |

Thomas Jefferson

The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes [and] delegated to that government certain definite powers and whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. To this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-states forming, as to itself, the other party. The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution the measure of its powers.

Commerce | Passion | Spirit | Commerce |

Thomas Jefferson

To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association -- the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

Thomas Jefferson

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Control | Friend | Government | Meaning | Money | People | Truth | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.

Money | System | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.

Association | Guarantee | Industry | Order | Thought | Association | Thought |

Thomas Merton

The moral evil in the world is due to man’s alienation from the deepest truth, from the springs of spiritual life within himself, to his alienation from God. Those who realize this try desperately to persuade and enlighten their brothers.

Individuality | Personality | World |

Thomas Merton

I am earth, earth. My heart's love bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air in which my own appointed place, field and valley stand reflected

Chance | Democracy | Ideals | Law | Present | Right | Selfishness | Society | Wonder | Society |

Thomas Merton

In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality. Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.

Ability | Authenticity | Belief | Decision | Hope | Life | Life | Men | Present | Reality | Relationship | Sacrifice | Salvation | Survival | Truth | Crisis |

Thomas Paine

It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same.

Change | Man | Men | Opinion | Reason | Revolution | Right | Time | Truth |

Thomas Paine

Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter.

Art | Heaven | War | World | Art |

Thomas Paine

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

Government | Man | Principles | Right | Thought | Time | Government | Govern | Thought |

Thomas Paine

It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engages.

Absence | Control | Impulse | Intention | Men | Nature | Power |

Thomas Paine

Small islands not capable of protecting themselves are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

Individual | Means | Society | Society |

Thomas Paine

The doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second redemption, obtained through the means of money given to the Church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth there is no such thing as redemption — that it is fabulous, and that man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker as he ever did stand since man existed, and that it is his greatest consolation to think so.

Children | God | God |

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky

We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality.

United Nations NULL

Article 8 - The United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs.

Aggression | Attainment | Conformity | Distinction | Justice | Nations | Peace | Principles | Problems | Respect | Rights | Self-determination | Suppression | Respect |