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

Emma Goldman

Served as inspiration for Roger Baldwin, a future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Change | Improvement | Life | Life | Price | Revolution | Struggle | Worth | Loss |

Emma Goldman

No sacrifice is lost for a great ideal!

Ignorance | Inhumanity | Man | Means | Protest | Revolution | Spirit | System | Wrong |

Emma Goldman

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.

Better | Life | Life | Means | Revolution | Society | Society |

Emma Goldman

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.

Evolution | Future | Hypocrisy | Ideas | Important | Lesson | Past | Psychology | Time |

Emma Goldman

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations. Such is the logic of patriotism.

Future | Individual | Law | Means | Oppression | Present | Revolution | Parent |

Emma Goldman

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labor a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.

Inevitable | Means | Revolution | Security |

Emma Goldman

Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

Change | Ideas | Means | Rest | Time |

Emma Goldman

The spirit of militarism has already permeated all walks of life. Indeed, I am convinced that militarism is a greater danger here than anywhere else, because of the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.

Brotherhood | Dignity | Equity | Justice | Liberty | Love | Sense | Society | Society |

English Proverbs

Let not the sun go down on your wrath.

Man | Praise |

English Proverbs

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Praise |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

So now do not worry, take what you have, and do your work and you will have a long life and a very merry one.

Enough | Happy | Life | Life | Praise | Rest | Value |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now.

Fault | Method | Money | Price | Self-deception | Thought | Fault | Thought |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

But while all fanaticism shows intellectual weakness, a fanaticism about the means to be employed for reaching quite uncertain objectives is sheer feeble mindedness.

Experience | Religion | Theoretical |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The exclusion of wisdom from economics, science and technology was something which we could perhaps get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position.

Experience | Life | Life | Means | Think |

Eudora Welty

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

Enough | Imagination | Little | People | Praise | Wonder | Blessed |

Euripedes NULL

Oh, trebly blest the placid lot of those whose hearth foundations are in pure love laid, where husband's breast with tempered ardor glows, and wife, oft mother, is in heart a maid!

Heart | Praise | Shame |

Ezra Taft Benson

It is now two hundred years since the Constitution was written. Have we been wise beneficiaries of the gift entrusted to us? Have we valued and protected the principles laid down by this great document? At this bicentennial celebration we must, with sadness, say that we have not been wise in keeping the trust of our Founding Fathers. For the past two centuries, those who do not prize freedom have chipped away at every major clause of our Constitution until today we face a crisis of great dimensions.

Enough | Grave |

Felix Adler

The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.

Death | Distinguish | Gold | Lesson |

Faith Baldwin

One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.

Gratitude | Praise | Time |