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

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

We brought ten thousand head of cattle to the Sierra one day and said to the peasants, simply, "Eat". And the peasants, for the first time in years and years, some for the first time in their lives, ate beef.

Administration | Understanding |

Ernst Toller

We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it.

Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

A petty concern with mere evidence is an antiquated and bourgeois feature of the captalist legal system. We are revolutionaries. We convict from a revolutionary passion.

Obligation | Order | Loss |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

There is no better way to earn money than to do the things that you love to do. Money can flow into your experience through endless avenues. It is not the choice of the craft that limits the money that flows - but only your attitude toward money.

People | Understanding | World |

Eugene Peterson

The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when solutions donÂ’t work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility. We need pruning. Cut back to our roots, we learn this psalm and discover the quietness of the weaned child, the tranquility of maturing trust. It is such a minute psalm that many have overlooked it, but for all its brevity and lack of pretense, it is essential. For every Christian encounters problems of growth and difficulties of development.

Danger | Existence | Obedience | Danger |

Eugene Peterson

You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.

Guidance | Habit | Need | Time | Understanding | Wisdom | Guidance |

Eugene Peterson

Instead of asking, “Why does this happen Why do I feel left in the lurch” we can ask “How does it happen that there are people who sing with such confidence, ‘God’s strong name is our help’”

Competence | God | Growth | Habit | Knowing | Knowledge | Love | People | Understanding | God |

Eugene Peterson

If we're trying to set education policy, we have to listen to the education experts.

Defeat | Future | Mistake | Nature | Need | Obedience | Organic | Past | Unity | Vision | Will |

Eugene Peterson

We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God sticks with us.

Birth | Death | Understanding | Will |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

I am guilty of believing that the human race can be humanized and enriched in every spiritual inference through the saner and more beneficent processes of peaceful persuasion applied to material problems rather than through wars, riots and bloodshed.

Appreciation | Capacity | Chance | Cunning | Enough | Nothing | Soul | Vision | World | Appreciation |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Foolish and vain indeed is the workingman who makes the color of his skin the stepping-stone to his imaginary superiority. The trouble is with his head, and if he can get that right he will find that what ails him is not superiority but inferiority, and that he, as well as the Negro he despises, is the victim of wage-slavery, which robs him of what he produces and keeps both him and the Negro tied down to the dead level of ignorance and degradation.

Struggle | Friends |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

In general. . . novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries.

Experiment | Revolution | Writing |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

Means | Pleasure | Protest | Old |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives.

Contempt | People |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The fruits of labor must be enjoyed by the working class.

Beginning | Birth | Crime | Cruelty | Dawn | Ignorance | Poverty | Cruelty |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

With faith and hope and courage we hold our heads erect and with dauntless spirit marshal the working class for the march from Capitalism to Socialism, from Slavery to Freedom, from Barbarism to Civilization.

Courage | Hell | History | Labor | Men | Need | Spirit | Struggle | Time | Will | World | Writing |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose.

Genius | Majority | Nothing | People | System |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.

Brotherhood | Cause | History | Time | Will |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on Earth.

Cunning | Destroy | Enough | Labor | Slavery | Struggle | Will | Understand |