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 Carlyle

Thy life is no idle dream, but a solemn reality; it is thine own, and it is all thou hast to front eternity with.

Man | System | Thought | Thought |

Thomas Guthrie

Perhaps God does with His heavenly garden as we do with our own. He may chiefly stock it from nurseries, and select for transplanting what is yet in its young and tender age--flowers before they have bloomed and trees ere they begin to bear.

God | Power | System | God |

Thomas Jefferson

I have come to a resolution myself as I hope every good citizen will, never again to purchase any article of foreign manufacture which can be had of American make, be the difference of price what it may.

Ethics | Men | System |

Thomas Jefferson

I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, not from our words, that our religion must be judged.

Addiction | Creed | Heaven | Men | System | Thinking |

Thomas Jefferson

Nothing but good can result from an exchange of information and opinions between those whose circumstances and morals admit no doubt of the integrity of their views.

Justify | Means | Necessity | System |

Thomas Jefferson

The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.

Care | Man | Oppression | Spirit | System | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

The elective franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people.

Character | Little | Morality | Religion | System | Tradition |

Thomas Jefferson

In the environment, every victory is temporary, every defeat permanent.

Age | Beginning | Coercion | Duty | Government | Opportunity | Service | System | Will | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least.

Opinion | Purpose | Purpose | System | Think |

Thomas Jefferson

The Pennsylvania legislature, who, on a proposition to make the belief in God a necessary qualification for office, rejected it by a great majority, although assuredly there was not a single atheist in their body. And you remember to have heard, that when the act for religious freedom was before the Virginia Assembly, a motion to insert the name of Jesus Christ before the phrase, the author of our holy religion, which stood in the bill, was rejected, although that was the creed of a great majority of them.

Opinion | System | Blessed | Happiness |

Thomas Jefferson

It becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those persons, whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens; and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.

Degeneracy | Freedom | Power | Principles | System | Trial |

Thomas Jefferson

When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny.

Belief | Cunning | Force | Influence | Public | Religion | System | Thought | Old | Thought |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

Irony | Lust | Mind | Remorse | System | Waste |

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

The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.

Dawn | Day | Fable | Father | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Hope | Mystical | Reason | System | Thought | Truth | Will | Thought |

Thomas Jefferson

The tax which will be paid for [the] purpose [of education] is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.

Debt | Earth | Majority | Progress | Redemption | System | Will |

Thomas Merton

In all His acts God orders all things, whether good or evil, for the good of those who know Him and seek Him and who strive to bring their own freedom under obedience to His divine purpose. All that is done by the will of God in secret is done for His glory and for the good of those whom He has chosen to share in His glory.

Convention | Death | Evasion | Life | Life | Meaning | People | Problems | Responsibility | System | Time | Tradition | Work | Understand |

Thomas Paine

Could the peaceable principle of the Quakers be universally established, arms and the art of war would be wholly extirpated: But we live not in a world of angels...I am thus far a Quaker, that I would gladly agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket and thank Heaven He has put it in my power.

God | Knowledge | Philosophy | Study | System | God |

Thomas Nagel

I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....

Opinion | System | Virtue | Virtue |

Thomas Paine

As to the book called the Bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times and bad men. There are but a few good characters in the whole book.

Action | Cause | God | Language | Nature | Power | Respect | System | Respect | Infidelity | God |