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

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Our business is to help get everything possible done to make sure the "last" chance for a peaceful development of the revolution, to help by the presentation of our programme, by making clear its national character, its absolute accord with the interests and demands of a vast majority of the population.

Man | Mankind | System | Will |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Social-Democracy, however, wants, on the contrary, to develop the class struggle of the proletariat to the point where the latter will take the leading part in the popular Russian revolution, i.e., will lead this revolution to a the democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

Choice | Mankind |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.

Man | Mankind | System | Will |

Vera Mary Brittain

Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one's self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one's gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left...

Achievement | Mankind |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

So conscience for the sinner distorts the truth of the upright, but (his) soul is in agony at the judgment of the Chinvat Bridge, having strayed by his own deeds and tongue from the Path of Righteousness.

Body | Faith | Knowledge | Life | Life | Mankind | Power | Soul |

Victor Hugo

He thought himself stronger than he was and believed he could play mouse with a lion.

Conversation | Enough | Mankind | Rest | Blessed | Friends |

Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

One should performed karma for the benefit of humanity with an unbiased approach because bias gives birth to evil, which creates thousands of obstacles in our path.

Birth | Deeds | Mankind | Deeds |

Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.

Asceticism | Idealism | Impulse | Mankind | Self-deception | Asceticism |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

Law | Mankind |

Tryon Edwards

The most we can get out of life is its discipline for ourselves, and its usefulness for others.

Good | Life | Life | Mankind | Perfection |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

The immediate cause of the increase of population is the excess of the births above deaths; and the rate of increase, or the period of doubling, depends upon the proportion which the excess of the births above the deaths bears to the population.

Mankind |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

Few persons will leave their families, connections, friends, and native land, to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are going.

Death | Earth | Inevitable | Man | Mankind | Power | Success | War | Work |

Thucydides NULL

The freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation.

Adversity | Decision | Fate | Fortune | Good | Lesson | Mankind | People | Power | Prosperity | Reason | Success | Truth | War | Fate |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken

Business | Disparagement | Error | Experience | History | Hope | Influence | Justice | Love | Mankind | Nations | People | Service | Will | World | Business |

Thucydides NULL

Their swaying bodies reflected the agitation of their minds, and they suffered the worst agony of all, ever just within the reach of safety or just on the point of destruction.

Habit | Hope | Judgment | Mankind | Reason | Sound |

Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV

The institution of marriage keeps the moral world in being, and secures it from an untimely dissolution. Without it, natural affection and amiableness would not exist, domestic education would become extinct, industry and economy be unknown, and man would be left to the precarious existence of the savage. But for this institution, learning and refinement would expire, government sink into the gulf of anarchy; and religion, hunted from earth, would hasten back to her native heavens.

Beauty | Enjoyment | Mankind | Nature | Beauty |

William Godwin

I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be more or less the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious and misery so unsupportable. So far as related to myself I resolved, and this resolution has never been entirely forgotten by me, to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer.

Circumstances | Determination | Mankind |

William Godwin

He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil.

Ignorance | Mankind |

William Havard

Let falsehood be a stranger to thy lips; shame on the policy that first began to tamper with the heart to hide its thoughts! And doubly shame on that inglorious tongue, that sold its honesty and told a lie.

Mankind |