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

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav or Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Nachman from Uman NULL

Likewise you should also be very careful never to say anything which implies even the slightest lack of faith, let alone total disbelief. Even if you are a believer in your heart, never express disbelief even as a joke - not even if you are merely quoting someone else to ridicule their opinion. To do this is very wrong and can be very damaging to your faith. Even as a joke it is forbidden say anything which implies disrespect of God.

Disbelief | Disrespect | Ridicule | Wrong |

Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough

I do not mean to expose my ideas to ingenious ridicule by maintaining that everything happens to every man for the best; but I will contend, that he who makes the best use of it, fulfills the part of a wise and good man.

Good | Ideas | Man | Ridicule | Will | Wise |

Richard Dawkins

I don't believe you until you tell me, do you really believe, for example, if they say they are Catholic, Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood? Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.

Body | Convention | Need | Religion | Ridicule | Universe |

Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before.

Dogma | Faith | Ridicule | Truth |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

It is foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife.

Censure | Man | Ridicule |

Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas of any one of them.

Ridicule |

Stephan Jay Gould

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions—and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

Aesthetic | Decision | History | Ridicule | Sound | Wonder |

Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Satire |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.

Existence | Experience | God | Life | Life | Ridicule | Trust | God |

Thomas Carlyle

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Meaning | Ridicule |

Thomas Jefferson

In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life if secured against all liability to account.

Nothing | Opposition | Purity | Ridicule | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

Responsibility weighs with its heaviest force on a single head.

Reason | Ridicule |

Thomas Paine

One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.

Folly | Giving | Mankind | Nature | Ridicule | Right |

William Carleton

The Captain approached him coolly and deliberately. “You will prosecute no one now, you bloody informer”, said he; “you will convict no more boys for taking an ould rusty gun an’ pistol from you, or for giving you a neighbourly knock or two into the bargain.” Just then from a window opposite him, proceeded the shrieks of a woman who appeared at it with the infant in her arms. She herself was almost scorched to death; but with the presence of mind and humanity of her sex, she was about to thrust the little babe out of the window. The Captain noticed this, and with characteristic atrocity, thrust, with a sharp bayonet, the little innocent, along with the person who endeavoured to rescue it, into the red flames, where they both perished. This was the work of an instant.

Error | Fear | Language | Means | People | Present | Ridicule | Sense | Will |

William Blake

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

Imagination | Joy | Man | Nature | Ridicule | Tears |

Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

I just want it to look like nothing else in the world. And it should be surrounded by a train.

Little | Satire |

Washington Irving

It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet.

Battle | Daughter | Faith | Marriage | Poetry | Prowess | Rites | Satire | Surrender |

Wallace Stevens

The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was in the genius of summer that they blew up the statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky and then to refill its emptiness again.

Comedy | Satire | Truth |