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

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

Envy | Existence | Individual | Jealousy | Life | Life | Light | People | Unhappiness |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.

Existence | Individual | Nothing |

Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different.

Absolute | Existence | Experience | Past | Reason | Regard | Respect | Space | Will | Words | World | Respect |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Envy | Existence | Individual | Jealousy | Life | Life | Light | Unhappiness |

Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun

My friends there was dancing here in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the earth. There was dancing again when the first Americans landed on the moon. I'd like to ask you, don't hang up your dancing slippers.

Challenge | Existence | Light | Science |

Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

Probability in mathematics or in statistical mechanics means a statement about our degree of knowledge of the actual situation. In throwing dice we do not know the fine details of the motion of our hands which determine the fall of the dice and therefore we say that the probability for throwing a special number is just one in six. The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater, however, meant more than that; it meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of `potentia’ in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.

Existence | Experiment | Harmony | Important | Language | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Wisdom | Work | Old |

Wilhelm Reich

I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life.

Art | Better | Error | Existence | Insight | Labor | Meaning | Nature | Perfection | Research | Thought | Will | Work | World | Art | Learn | Think | Thought |

Wilhelm Reich

Work-democracy adds a decisive piece of knowledge to the scope of ideas related to freedom. The masses of people who work and bear the burden of social existence on their shoulders neither are conscious of their social responsibility nor are they capable of assuming the responsibility for their own freedom. This is the result of the century-long suppression of rational thinking, the natural functions of love, and scientific comprehension of the living. Everything related to the emotional plague in social life can be traced back to this incapacity and lack of consciousness. It is work-democracy’s contention that, by its very nature, politics is and has to be unscientific, i.e., that it is an expression of human helplessness, poverty, and suppression.

Democracy | Existence | Insight | Love | Necessity | Politics | Responsibility | Suppression | Thinking | Work |

Wilhelm Reich

Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians.

Existence | Means | Practice |

Wilhelm Reich

Revolutionary practice in any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development. To be radical, according to Marx, means “going to the root of things.” If one goes to the root of things, if one understands their contradictory character, the means of mastering the reaction become plain.

Absolute | Doubt | Error | Existence | Machines | Nations | People | Power | Proletariat | Rationality | Sin | Wrong |

Wilhelm Reich

You are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it in the belief of doing it for the sake of "socialism," or "the state," or "national honor," or "the glory of God."

Contention | Existence | Ideas | Knowledge | Life | Life | People | Politics | Responsibility | Suppression | Work |

Wilhelm Reich

Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. Migratory cancer cells are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political. It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!

Anxiety | Anxiety | Existence | Experience | Fighting | Freedom | Guilt | Knowledge | Love | Meaning | Means | Money | Organization | People | Power | Precision | Self-determination | Sin | Weapons | Will | Precision | Old |

Wilhelm Reich

I came to consider the instinct as nothing more than the motor aspect of pleasure.

Energy | Existence | Human race | Life | Life | Race | Science | Work |

Wilhelm Reich

Inquiry in the realm of Basic Natural Law is outside the judicial domain of this or any other kind of social administration anywhere on this globe, in any land, nation, or region.

Existence | Individual | People | Responsibility | Society | Surplus | System | Will | Work | Society |

Wilhelm Reich

He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that’s because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word “radical.” His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government.

Energy | Error | Existence | Meaning |

Wilhelm Reich

The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.

Character | Existence | Relationship | World |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself . . . , I see the elementary laws never apologize.

Existence | Man | Time | Will | Think |

Walter Rauschenbusch

Our generation is profoundly troubled by the problems of organized society.

Evil | Existence | Labor | Life | Life | Men | Mind | Nations | Play | Power | Sense |

Walter Savage Landor

And about her courts were seen liveried angels robed in green, wearing, by St Patrick's bounty, emeralds big as half the county.

Eternal | Existence | Heart | Land | Right | Space | Work |