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

Wendell Berry

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Compassion | Enough | Imagination | Kill | Knowledge | People | Power | Old |

Wendell Berry

Under the rule of the free market ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation.

Discipline | Knowledge | Morality | Time |

Wendell Berry

We have always had to have ‘a good reason’ for doing away with small operators, and in modern times the good reason has often been sanitation, for which there is apparently no small or cheap technology.

Era | Experience | Illusion | Life | Life | Machines | World | Learn |

Wendell Berry

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

Knowledge |

Wendell Berry

To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity.

Beginning | Family | Global | Good | Knowledge | Patience | People | Politics | Principles |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The Ego is not the source of the Shadow and the Shadow is not the source of Ego. The Shadow does not have to be made conscious to the Ego to effect its Holy Mission. The Ego does not have to be conscious to the Shadow to effect its Holy Mission. Both Ego and Shadow are completely under the egis of the Self. The Shadow modulates…the Ego orients. The unconscious forces that make up the Ego and the Shadow are Transpersonal and Holy. They must not be appropriated by either the Ego or the Shadow and certainly not by the ego….the surface awareness. Shadow formation is never a conscious process nor does it need to be made conscious. It functions best unconsciously….just as the forces of the Ego operate best unconsciously. The Shadow can live through an individual, a family, a clan, a tribe, a community, a nation, and all of Humanity as a function of the intrinsic nature of Temporality/Manifestation/Time/Space. It is a part of Divinity’s (Self’s) Homeostasis or the Holy Love mystery of Balance. It is innate to the Wholeness or Holiness of Self.

Ego | Free will | Illusion | Life | Life | Mystery | Play | Self | Will |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.

Knowledge | Life | Life | Public | Teach |

W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Knowledge | Observation | Study | Time |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different shields.

Art | Beauty | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Price | Science | Art | Beauty |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing.

Adventure | Awareness | Defense | Demeanor | Experience | Extreme | Giving | Important | Indifference | Knowledge | Law | Means | Power | Qualities | Sacred | Time | Understanding | Wholeness | Will | Awareness |

W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross

The essential defect of the ideal utilitarian theory is that it ignores the highly personal; character of duty.

Acceptance | Authority | Belief | Body | Knowledge | Law | Mind | Nothing | People | Reality | System | Will | Learn |

W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

Illusion |

W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.

Attention | Contradiction | Dignity | Discovery | Habit | Innovation | Knowledge | Lord | Man | Mind | Reputation | Science | Society | Study | System | Terror | Theology | Thought | Time | Society | Discovery | Thought |

W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

Let us ask our suppliers to come and help us to solve our problems.

Knowledge |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

The appeal of arithmetic to infants is usually self-evident and recognising unusual mathematical maturity is not difficult. The unjustified fears of some educationists about allowing children to forge ahead, needs discussion and recognition of the need for young mathematicians to work in depth and at speed.

Knowledge |

W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.

Action | Change | Knowledge |

Walker Percy

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

Knowledge | Will | Work |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

Mathematicians, it is often said, tend to be musical. It is less well known that problems arising from music have played an important role in the discovery of fundamental mathematical ideas. Questions about the vibrations of a piano string led to a fierce controversy that forced mathematicians to clarify their ideas about area, continuity, and the convergence of series.

Education | Knowledge | Nothing | Opportunity | Will | Trouble | Teacher |

Wallace Stevens

He had said that everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

Illusion |

W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

Lack of knowledge – that is the problem.

Action | Knowledge | World |