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

Arthur Compton, fully Arthur Holly Compton

I should be inclined to claim that the person who limits his interests to the means of living without consideration of the content or meaning of his life is defeating God's great purpose when he brought into existence a creature with the intelligence and godlike powers that are found in man. It is in living wisely and fully that one's soul grows.

Consideration | Existence | God | Intelligence | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Soul |

Arthur C Clarke, formally Sir Arthur Charles Clark

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Intelligence | Survival |

Carl Sagan

The fact that religions can be so shamelessly dishonest, so contemptuous of the intelligence of their adherents, and still flourish does not speak very well for the tough-mindedness of the believers. But it does not indicate, if a demonstration were needed, that near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.

Experience | Inquiry | Intelligence |

Charles A. Beard, fully Charles Austin Beard

I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves in the mire and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amid the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best on our curious heritage prevail.

Challenge | Intelligence | Men | World |

Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze

God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.

Error | God | Imperfection | Intelligence | Truth |

Daniel Goleman

Even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring the emotional intelligence that also matters immensely for our personal destiny.

Culture | Destiny | Guarantee | Intelligence | Life | Life | Prosperity | Happiness |

Don Herold

There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.

Intelligence | Sense |

Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

[Central Intelligence Agency] analysts were only too aware that no one has ever been penalized for not having foreseen an opportunity, but that many careers have been blighted for not predicting a risk. Therefore the intelligence community has always been tempted to forecast dire consequences for any conceivable course of action, an attitude that encourages paralysis rather than adventurism.

Action | Consequences | Intelligence | Opportunity | Risk |

Immanuel Kant

Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know]. Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

Courage | Determination | Enlightenment | Guidance | Intelligence | Man | Self | Guidance |

John Stuart Mill

As soon as mankind have unanimously accepted a truth, does the truth perish within them? The highest aim and best result of improved intelligence, is has hitherto been thought, is to unite mankind more and more in the acknowledgment of all important truths; and does the intelligence only last as long as it has not achieved its object? Do the fruits of conquest perish by the very completeness of the victory?

Conquest | Important | Intelligence | Mankind | Object | Thought | Truth |

John Stuart Mill

Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not - is part of his education. And a very bad education it often is; requiring all that can be done by cultivated intelligence and will, to counteract its tendencies.

Education | Individual | Intelligence | Will |

John Stuart Mill

Among the foremost benefits of free government is that education of the intelligence and of the sentiments which is carried down to the very lowest ranks of the people when they are called to take a part in after which directly affect the great interests of their country.

Education | Government | Intelligence | People | Government |

Joseph Addison

The intelligence of affection is carried on by the eye only; good-breeding has made the tongue falsify the heart, and act a part of continued restraint, while nature has preserved the eyes to herself, that she may not be disguised or misrepresented.

Good | Heart | Intelligence | Nature | Restraint |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

American high school students of 1950 had a working vocabulary averaging 25,000 words. Today that level is 10,000. As of 1998 some 85 percent of all academic honors in the United States were taken by foreign-born students. Offspring of these students may, in turn, keep our standards from disappearing for perhaps one or two generations more, but that will be all. Sooner or later they will become we, and who will be left to comprehend that intelligence itself has deteriorated?

Intelligence | Will | Words |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

Each major stage of development offers a window of opportunity distinctly different from anything that has come before. The increase of intelligence at each stage of development is disproportionately greater than the increase exhibited in the previous stage, similar to the order of increase found in the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes.

Intelligence | Opportunity | Order |

Latin Proverbs

Speech is given to many; intelligence to few.

Intelligence | Speech |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

Natural law: Intelligence, no matter how innate or genetically encoded, can unfold within us only when an actual model for that intelligence is given us. Bio-cultural effects, once initiated, tend to self-generate. Projected by us, we perceive the behaviors demonstrated by our great models as powers out there to which we are subject, rather than as potentials within ourselves to be lived.

Intelligence | Law | Model | Self |

Lewis Mumford

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

Intelligence |

Karl Barth

History is the display of the supposed advantages of power and intelligence which some men possess over others, of the struggle for existence hypocritically described by ideologists as the struggle for justice and freedom, of the ebb and flow of old and new forms of human righteousness, each vying with the rest in the solemnity and triviality... Yet one drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things.

Display | Eternity | Existence | Freedom | History | Intelligence | Justice | Men | Power | Rest | Righteousness | Struggle | Old |

Lewis Mumford

To despise the animal basis of life, to seek value only at the level of conscious intelligence and rational effort, is ultimately to lose one's sense of cosmic relationships.

Despise | Effort | Intelligence | Life | Life | Sense | Value |