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

William Graham Sumner

Socialists are filled with the enthusiasm of equality... Equality of possession or of rights and equality before the law are diametrically opposed to each other. The object of equality before the law is to make the state entirely neutral.

Character | Enthusiasm | Equality | Law | Object | Rights |

Samuel Adams

Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Duty | Law | Liberty | Life | Life | Property | Right | Rights | Wisdom |

Basil Alfred Yeaxlee

Freedom springs from within, whether in a man or in a people. To remove disabilities and confer the franchise is not enough. Men must be enabled to grow if they are to exercise their rights with dignity and effect. For this reason the widening of the franchise in democratic countries has always been accompanied or followed by the development of popular education.

Character | Dignity | Education | Enough | Freedom | Man | Men | People | Reason | Rights | Wisdom |

Spiro T. Agnew, fully Spiro Theodore Agnew

Intellectual and spiritual leaders hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle becomes a flood... And while no thinking person denies that social injustice exits, no thinking person can condone any group, for any reason, taking justice into his own hands. Once this is permitted, democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise: the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities.

Cause | Civil disobedience | Defiance | Democracy | Disobedience | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Law | Little | Reason | Rights | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

William Ellery Channing

I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, and receives new truth as an angel for Heaven.

Faith | Heaven | Man | Mind | Rights | Truth | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

The special theory of relativity... creates a formal dependence between the way in which the spatial co-ordinates on the one hand, and the temporal co-ordinates, on the other, have to enter into the natural laws.

Dependence | Wisdom |

Charles James Fox

Men are entitled to equal rights, but to equal rights in unequal things.

Men | Rights | Wisdom |

Edward Everett

Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people’s peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy.

Anarchy | Government | Intelligence | Nothing | Order | Peace | People | Rights | Wisdom | Government |

French National Assembly - Declaration of the Rights of Man NULL

The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.

Liberty | Man | Oppression | Property | Rights | Security | Wisdom |

Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

During war we imprison the rights of man.

Man | Rights | War | Wisdom |

Hugo Grotius, also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot

A state is a perfect body of free men, united together in order to enjoy common rights and advantages.

Body | Men | Order | Rights | Wisdom |

Garrett Hardin, fully Garrett James Hardin

Beyond the limits of his confining skin, no man can own any thing. “Property” refers not to things owned but to the rights granted by society; they must periodically be re-examined in the light of social justice.

Justice | Light | Man | Property | Rights | Society | Wisdom |

Thomas Hobbes

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

Consequences | Dependence | Knowledge | Science | Wisdom |

Thomas Jefferson

Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.

Rights | Wisdom |