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

David Hume

Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society.

Character | Disbelief | Morality | Peace | Reason | Society |

Tobias Smollett, fully Tobias George Smollett

I consider the world as made for me, not me for the world. It is my maxim therefore to enjoy it while I can, and let futurity shift for itself.

Wisdom | World |

Thomas Jefferson

I sincerely believe, with you, that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Money | Posterity |

Horace Greeley

Duty and to-day are ours; results and futurity belong to God.

Day | Duty | God |

John Stuart Mill

Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, and the conquests made form the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.

Day | Destiny | Energy | Foresight | Guidance | Life | Life | Mankind | Means | Nature | Property | Guidance | Intellect |

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Influence | Words | Understand |

Thomas Jefferson

I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the mockingbird. Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs.

Money | Posterity |

Thomas Jefferson

The principles of our Constitution are wisely opposed to all perpetuations of power, and to every practice which may lead to hereditary establishments.

Money |

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 |

William Blake

All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat; For the greater the fool in the pencil more blest, And when they are drunk they always paint best.

Present | Remorse |