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

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.

Books | Children |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

My general response to boarding school was: anything to get away from that fucking mother of mine. She was a monster.

Contempt | Father |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

Enemy |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

Deeds | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Vision | Wise | Work | Deeds |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

Means | Pleasure | Protest | Old |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.

Future | Hope | Television | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

My grandfather, the Senator [power broker Thomas Gore of Oklahoma], he was magnificent. He loathed the human race. He was extraordinary. He always said if there was another race, he would join it. And his grandson inherited much of his philosophy.

Mother |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

Freedom | Greed | Price | Self-love | Words |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

But it wasnÂ’t until I was well into my twenties and had Jewish friends that I heard about guilt.

Business | Challenge | Business |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

Authority | Family | Nature | Politics |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

Conspiracy | Policy |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

Age | Culture | Evil | Father | God | Loathing | Obedience | Politics | God | Old |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I have been reading Plotinus all evening. He has the power to sooth me; and I find his sadness curiously comforting. Even when he writes: Life here with the things of earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failure of the wing. The wing has indeed failed. One sinks. Defeat is certain. Even as I write these lines, the lamp wick sputters to an end, and the pool of light in which I sit contracts. Soon the room will be dark. One has always feared that death would be like this. But what else is there? With Julian, the light went, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of timeÂ’s mystery and a manÂ’s love of life.

Fortune | Good |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain.

Children | Duty | Obligation | Think |

Euripedes NULL

Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom.

Children | Love | People | Virtue | Virtue |

Eugenio Montale

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

Question | Taste | Time |