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

John Koster

Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness.

Atheism | History | Machines | Man | Men | Need | People | Thinking | Universe | Learn | Think |

Aldo Leopold

As nearly as I can see, all the new isms – Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and especially the late but not lamented Technocracy – outdo even Capitalism itself in their preoccupation with one thing: The distribution of more machine-made commodities to more people. They all proceed on the theory that if we can all keep warm and full, and all own a Ford and a radio, the good life will follow. Their programs differ only in ways to mobilize machines to this end. Though they despise each other, they are all, respect of this objective, as identically alike as peas in a pod. They are competitive apostles of a single creed: salvation by machinery.

Capitalism | Creed | Despise | Good | Life | Life | Machines | People | Respect | Salvation | Will | Respect |

Lawrence Kohlberg

Moral thought seems to behave like all other kinds of thought. Progress through the moral levels and stages is characterized by increasing differentiation and increasing integration, and hence is the same kind of progress that scientific theory presents.

Integration | Progress | Thought | Thought |

Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

Anarchism (from the Greek… contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – Harmony in such a society not being obtained by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted form the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.

Authority | Conduct | Government | Harmony | Law | Life | Life | Obedience | Society | Submission | Society | Government |

Edwin Lewis

What did Resurrection mean but victory over death and therefore victory over sin and therefore evidence of a new power at work in the world and therefore the opening of the gates of a new life?

Death | Evidence | Life | Life | Power | Sin | Work | World |

John Macmurray

The plainest historical evidence for the effectiveness of religion as a positive social form lies in the history of the Jews.

Evidence | History | Religion |

Arno Allan Penzias

Today’s dogma holds that matter is eternal. The dogma comes from the intuitive belief of people who don’t want to accept the observational evidence that the universe was created – despite the fact that the creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far. As a result, the people who reject the data can arguably be described as having a religious belief that matter must be eternal… Since scientists prefer to operate in the belief that the universe must be meaningless – that reality consists of nothing more than the sum of the world’s tangible constituents – they cannot confront the idea of creation easily, or take it lightly.

Belief | Dogma | Eternal | Evidence | Nothing | People | Reality | Universe | World |

Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL

The theory of war as an apt and proportionate means of solving international conflicts is now out of date.

Means | War |

Richard Powers

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

Control | Reverence | Science | Wonder |

Garrett Thomson

While the theory of evolution spells out how the changes take place, any concept of a cosmic plan would specify why.

Evolution | Plan |

David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm

Quantum theory requires us to give up the idea that the electron, or any other object, has, by itself, any intrinsic properties at all.

Object |

Brendan Gill

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Evidence | Life | Life |