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

Wendell Berry

To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity.

Beginning | Family | Global | Good | Knowledge | Patience | People | Politics | Principles |

Wallace Stevens

The prologues are over. It is a question, now, of final belief. So, say that final belief must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The Labor Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organization of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.

Appearance | Men | Order | Truth |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

Books | Disease | Fortune | Love | Nature | People | Taste | Child |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.

Important | Society | Society |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of government

Business | Men | Play | Time | Business | Old |

Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

Conspiracy | Looks | Reality |

Felix Adler

The right for the right's sake is the motto which everyone should take for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are moral beings, in how far not yet.

Future | Indispensable | Individual | Service | Time | Will |

Felix Adler

Theologians often say that faith must come first, and that morality must be deduced from faith. We say that morality must come first, and faith, to those whose nature fits them to entertain it, will come out of the experience of a deepened moral life as its richest, choicest fruit. Precisely because moral culture is the aim, we cannot be content merely to lift the mass of mankind above the grosser forms of evil. We must try to advance the cause of humanity by developing in ourselves, as well as in others, a higher type of manhood and womanhood than the past has known. To aid in the evolution of a new conscience, to inject living streams of moral force into the dry veins of materialistic communities is our aim. We seek to come into touch with the ultimate power in things, the ultimate peace in things, which yet, in any literal sense, we know well that we cannot know. We seek to become morally certain — that is, certain for moral purposes — of what is beyond the reach of demonstration. But our moral optimism must include the darkest facts that pessimism can point to, include them and transcend them.

Children | Future | Happy | Light | Past | Time | Truth | Will | Work | World |