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 Ford

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

Capital punishment | Charity | Crime | Poverty | Punishment | Wisdom | Wrong |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.

Man | Tragedy | War | Wisdom |

Benjamin Franklin

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

Life | Life | Tragedy | Wisdom | Wise | Old |

Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

When a man is wrong and won't admit is, he always gets angry.

Man | Wisdom | Wrong |

Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman

It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much.

Business | Capitalism | Crime | Government | Individual | Judgment | Wisdom | Wrong | Government | Value |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Judging only by outer appearances is a mistake, because things are rarely what they seem... Disapproval of a person is disapproval of God. There is a great difference between being judgmental and using good judgment. You have to love each person’s divine essence, but you do not have to like someone’s inappropriate behavior. Wrong judgment impedes your spiritual growth.

Behavior | God | Good | Growth | Judgment | Love | Mistake | Wisdom | Wrong |

James Russell Lowell

Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.

Truth | Wisdom | Wrong |

James Russell Lowell

It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong is in their heads.

Men | Sense | Society | Wisdom | Wrong | Society |

Van Wyck Mason

Thinkin' is cheap, but thinkin' wrong is expensive.

Wisdom | Wrong |

Abraham Lincoln

Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice.

Justice | Opinion | Public | Sense | Wisdom | Wrong |

Robert J. McCracken, D.D.

We have lose the habit of thinking quietly, of trying to know ourselves and our friends, and the world around us, and the God who is above and within us. We are looking in the wrong places for happiness. We are so exclusively occupied with material things and with their accumulation that the higher values are crowded out.

God | Habit | Thinking | Wisdom | World | Wrong | God |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

It is absurd to speak of right and wrong per se. Injury, violation, exploitation, annihilation, cannot be wrong in themselves, for life essentially presupposes injury, violation, exploitation, and annihilation.

Absurd | Life | Life | Right | Wisdom | Wrong |

Maurice Nicoll

We must form the picture of the life as a growth, transverse to time, and capable of growing not merely in one part but in many parts, i.e. we must get rid of the idea that he life only grows from the present. This gives a wrong relation to the moment. The life may grow in all parts of itself ad we may be affected by these growing directions (in other parts of our personal Time) even in the ‘present’.

Growth | Life | Life | Present | Time | Wisdom | Wrong |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth - and youth is the time of real tragedy - that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.

Respect | Time | Tragedy | Wisdom | Youth | Youth |

N. Scott Momaday, fully Navarre Scott Momaday

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves... The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.

Existence | Imagination | Tragedy | Wisdom |

Robert Peel, fully Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet

Public opinion is compounded by folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

Folly | Opinion | Prejudice | Public | Right | Weakness | Wisdom | Wrong |

H. E. Stocher

Research teaches a man to admit he is wrong and to be proud of the fact that he does so, rather than try with all his energy to defend an unsound plan because he is afraid that admission of error is a confession of weakness when rather it is a sign of strength.

Energy | Error | Man | Plan | Research | Strength | Weakness | Wisdom | Wrong | Afraid |