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

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

Attention | Mind | Writing |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.

Good | Grave | Knowing | Memory | Wrong |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

Freedom | Greed | Price | Self-love | Words |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.

Memory |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

They are distorted, deformed, hideous mentally and morally. Their trade is treason, their breath is pollution and yet the officials of the C.B.&Q. formed a conspiracy with these professional liars, perjurers, cut-throats and murderers to overcome a strike, the result of a policy of flagrant injustice.

Duty | Government | Talking | Time | War | Government |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the higher altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for the freedom not only to conform but to consume.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.

Lesson | Right | Thought | Thought |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

As a rule hogs are only raised where they have good health and grow fat. Any old place will do to raise human beings.

Capitalism | Cause | Destroy | Duty | Good | Power | Time | Traitor | Treason | World | Worry |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

Labor | Land | Present | Right | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

Battle | Criticism | Day | Life | Life | Literature | Nothing | Order | Present | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

Future | Nothing | Novels | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Justify | Order | War | Will |

Eustace Budgell

But what has been often urged as a consideration of much more weight, is not only the opinion of the better sort, but the general consent of mankind to this great truth; which I think could not possibly have come to pass, but from one of the three following reasons: either that the idea of a God is innate and co-existent with the mind itself; or that this truth is so very obvious that it is discovered by the first exertion of reason in persons of the most ordinary capacities; or, lastly, that it has been delivered down to us through all ages by a tradition from the first man. The Atheists are equally confounded, to whichever of these three causes we assign it.

Better | Desire | Good | Impression | Order | Time | Will | Words |

Eustace Budgell

I find but few beards worth taking notice of in the reign of King James the First.

Boys | Education | Genius | Good | Man | Memory | Mind | Nothing | Will |

Euripedes NULL

Do we, holding that gods exist, deceive ourselves with unsubstantiated dreams, and lies, while random careless chance and change alone rule the world?

Eustace Budgell

We see by these instances what homage the world has formerly paid to beards; and that a barber was not then allowed to make those depredations on the faces of the learned which have been permitted him of late years.

Behavior | Body | Folly | Little | Love | Man | Memory | Past | Power | Time |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Sadness |

Evelyn Underhill

Love... makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.

Means | Present |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.