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

James Boswell

All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Experience | Freedom | Will | Wisdom |

Niels Bohr, fully Aage Niels Bohr

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

Wisdom |

Brown v. Board of Education NULL

Today education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

Awakening | Citizenship | Education | Good | Important | Life | Life | Opportunity | Public | Right | Service | Society | Training | Wisdom | Child |

William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade

Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.

Law | Nature | Order | Play | Sense | Wisdom |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

Desire | Science | Wisdom |

Harry Woodburn Chase

Man's knowledge of science has clearly outstripped his knowledge of man. Our only hope of making the atom servant rather than master lies in education, in a broad liberal education where each student within his capacity can free himself from trammels of dogmatic prejudice and apply his educational accouterment to besetting social and human problems.

Capacity | Education | Hope | Knowledge | Man | Prejudice | Problems | Science | Wisdom |

Samuel Butler

Any class is all right if it will only let others be so.

Right | Will | Wisdom |

François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion.

Atheism | Beauty | Fidelity | Hope | Men | Mother | People | Religion | Sensibility | Wisdom | Woman | Beauty |

Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz

War is an act of force, and to the application of that force there is no limit. Each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and a reciprocal action results which in theory can have no limit.

Action | Force | War | Wisdom |

John Dewey

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are all right in theory but that when it comes to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise.

Circumstances | Extreme | Mankind | Right | Wisdom | Think |

Jean Cocteau

Art is science made clear.

Art | Science | Wisdom |

Agatha Christie, fully Dame Agatha Miller Christie

The gap between theory and practice is a wide one.

Practice | Wisdom |

Donald Davidson

The first principle asserts that at least some mental events interact causally with physical events... The second principle is that where there is causality, there must be a law: events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws... The third principle is that there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained... from the fact that there can be no strict psychophysical laws, and without our other two principles, we can infer the truth of a version of the identity theory, that is, a theory that identifies at least some mental events with physical events.

Cause | Events | Law | Principles | Truth | Wisdom |

Cleobulus NULL

We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.

Enemy | Friend | Order | Service | Wisdom |