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

Ronald A. Heifetz

Even if the weight of carrying people’s hopes and pains may fall mainly, for a time, on one person’s shoulders, leadership cannot be exercised alone. The lone-warrior model of leadership is heroic suicide. Each of us had blind spots that require the vision of others. Each of us has passions that need to be contained by others.

Attention | Children | Individual | Rank | Rest | Study | Time | Child |

Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"

History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.

Freedom |

Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of ‘justice’, but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If ‘freedom’ becomes ‘privilege’, the workings of political freedom are broken.

Freedom |

Rufus Choate

You don’t want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.

Music |

Rush Limbaugh

The truth does not require a majority to prevail, ladies and gentlemen. The truth is its own power. The truth will out. Never forget that.

Convention | People | Philosophy | Think |

Rush Limbaugh

And I'm not going to apologize for it, I'm just quoting Emanuel. It's in the news. I think the news is that he's out there calling Obama's number one supporters effing retards. So now there's going to be a meeting. There's going to be a retard summit at the White House, much like the beer summit between Obama and Gates and that cop in Cambridge.

Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

We can travel longer, night and day, without losing our spirits than almost any persons we ever met.

Conduct | Extreme | Moderation | Power | Moderation | Old |

Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

The progress of society is mainly ... the improvement in the condition of the workingmen of the world.

Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

The President of the United States should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves his country best.

Necessity | Office |

Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes

One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.

Bitterness | Danger | Extreme | Government | Important | People | Public | Reform | System | Temptation | Will | Government | Danger | Temptation |

Samuel Gompers

I know that there may be several men who have charged the American Federation of Labor . . . to be against what they are pleased to call industrial unionism or the one big union, and I would venture to say that when they . . . consider this proposition outside of our union [Cigar Makers International Union] then they are industrialists; but when there is a proposal to open our doors and go into the highways and byways and organize these men and women against whom literally we are closing our doors, it is opposed.

Censure | Man | Organization | Theories |

Samuel Gompers

I have come to the conclusion . . . that it is our duty to live our lives as workers in the society in which we live, and not to work for the downfall or the destruction or the overthrow of that society, but for the fuller development and evolution of the society in which we live; to make life the better worth living.

Labor | Time |

Sidney Hook

I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.

Indifference | Nothing | Opposition | Smile | Thought | Words | Approval | Thought |

Simon Wiesenthal

The only value of nearly five decades of my work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest.

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

Light | Parents | Taste |

Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

It is not the case that Germany is rapidly approaching equality with us. Her real strength is not fifty per cent. of our strength in Europe to-day.

Action | Dispute | Freedom | Means | Nothing | People | Power | Tyranny |

Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

I am one of those who would rather sink with faith than swim without it.

Justice | Longing | Majority | Man | Power | Security | Surrender | Trust | Will |

Stephen Hawking

On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Hawking smiled and said: I'm working on that.

Day | Destroy | Experiment | Famous | Fun | Future | Giving | Guests | Nothing | Past | Reason | Rule | Sound | Thinking | Thought | Time | Universe | Will | Think | Thought |

Stefan Zweig

When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.

Conscience | Good | Guilt | Little |

Theodore Roszak

Mentality is the basic, irreducible continuum of the universe... What, then, if the mechanistic model of reality is exactly the inverse of the truth?