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

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

It is not God that is worshipped but the group or the authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority and not violation of integrity.

Authority | Disobedience | God | Integrity | Sin | God |

Louis Auguste Sabatier

Like every good teacher, authority should labor to render itself useless.

Authority | Good | Labor |

Sidney Spencer

There is an inevitable tension between mysticism and religious orthodoxy… For the mystic, whatever his professed creed, final authority lies in his own experience.

Authority | Creed | Experience | Inevitable | Mysticism |

Louis Auguste Sabatier

And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.

Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

William Graham Sumner

Persecution of a dissenter is always popular I the group which he has abandoned. Toleration of dissent is no sentiment of the masses.

Dissent | Sentiment | Toleration |

Laurence Steinberg

What causes adolescents to rebel is not the assertion of authority but the arbitrary use of power, with little explanation of the rules and no involvement in the decision-making.

Assertion | Authority | Decision | Little | Power |

Nicholas Copernicus

If there should be any [persons], who though ignorant in Mathematics, yet pretending a skill in those Learnings, should dare, upon the authority of some place of Scripture wrested to their purpose, to condemn and censure my Hypothesis, I value them not, but shall slight their inconsiderate judgment.

Authority | Censure | Hypothesis | Judgment | Mathematics | Purpose | Purpose | Scripture | Skill | Value |

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Reason provides a means of escaping from the constraints of belief-systems backed by authority and from the resentment which clever people feel at the power of their own passions. Because reason--in admittedly varying degrees--is available to everybody, it has a potential advantage over the truth you feel and the truth you are told.

Authority | Belief | Means | People | Power | Reason | Resentment | Truth |

Albert Einstein

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Authority | Enemy | Respect | Truth | Respect |

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

When we distrust passion because it is too subjective, or reject authority because it has no input of our own, we flee to reason.

Authority | Distrust | Passion | Reason |

Albert Einstein

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

Authority | Ethics | Immortality | Individual |

Gerald Alexander Larue

Freethinkers are those who reach judgment based on critical thinking and independent reasoning without regard to prevailing authority and tradition.

Authority | Critical thinking | Judgment | Regard | Thinking | Tradition | Critical Thinking |

Edward Wadie Saïd

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.

Authority | Ideas | Nothing | Taste |

Aeschylus NULL

Everyone is harsh whose authority is new.

Authority |

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.

Authority | Crime | Destiny | Failure |

Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger

The individual freedoms destroyed by the increase in national authority have been in the main the freedom to deny black Americans their elementary rights as citizens, the freedom to work little children in mills... the freedom to pay starvation wages... the freedom to... pollute the environment - all freedoms that, one supposes, a civilized country can readily do without

Authority | Children | Freedom | Individual | Little | Rights | Work |