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

Nicholas Murray Butler

Time was invented by Almighty God in order to give ideas a chance.

Chance | God | Ideas | Order | Time | Wisdom | God |

Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches

For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out.

Absolute | Indifference | Men | Passion | Peace | Time | War | Wisdom | World |

William Ellery Channing

The chief evil of war is more evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew man, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey.

Evil | Fraud | Little | Lust | Man | Perfidy | Rage | War | Wisdom |

Boake Carter

In time of war the first casualty is truth.

Time | Truth | War | Wisdom |

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

If the aim of the military action is an equivalent for the political object, that action will in general diminish as the political object diminishes. The more this object comes to the front, the more will this be so. This explains how, without self-contradiction, there can be wars of all degrees of importance and energy, from a war of extermination down to a mere state of armed observation.

Action | Contradiction | Energy | Object | Observation | Self | War | Will | Wisdom |

Agatha Christie, fully Dame Agatha Miller Christie

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

Nothing | War | Wisdom |

Russell W. Davenport, fully Russell Wheeler Davenport

It is not solutions that make ideas attractive. It is unsolved possibilities.

Ideas | Wisdom |

David H. Comins

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

Ideas | People | Will | Wisdom |

John Dewey

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.

Abstract | Ideas | Preference | Wisdom |

Sri Chinmoy, born Chinmoy Kumar Ghose

Choose a friend. He will help you. Alas, he deserts you. Choose an enemy. He will fight against you. Lo, he corrects and perfects you.

Enemy | Friend | Will | Wisdom |

Dean C. Corrigan

Teachers of today must have the ability to bring personal meaning to ideas as they investigate, interpret and integrate their thoughts. They must possess their own unique conceptual frameworks on which to hang ideas. They should be able to select, and build upon, significant ideas, observe relationships, and distinguish essential matters from irrelevant and incidental ones.

Ability | Distinguish | Ideas | Meaning | Unique | Wisdom |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

It is good... to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary as it is difficult to acquire. All that we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ration; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Belief | Death | Fear | Good | Happy | Ignorance | Imagination | Life | Life | Mind | Nature | Organic | Struggle | War | Wisdom |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Action | Beginning | Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Inheritance | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Object | Sense | Struggle | War | Wisdom |

John Dewey

The only way to abolish war (is) to make peace heroic.

Peace | War | Wisdom |

John Dewey

The more horrible a depersonalized scientific mass war becomes, the more necessary it is to find universal ideal motives to justify it.

Justify | Motives | War | Wisdom |

Declaration of American Women NULL

Man-made barriers, laws, social customs and prejudices continue to keep a majority of women in an inferior position without full control of our lives and bodies. From infancy throughout life, in personal and public relations, in the family, in the schools, in every occupation and profession, too often we find our individuality, our capabilities, our earning powers diminished by discriminatory practices and outmoded ideas of what a woman is, what a woman can do, and what a woman must be... We lack effective political and economic power We have only minor and insignificant roles in making, interpreting and enforcing our laws, in running our political parties, businesses, unions, schools and institutions, in directing the media, in governing our country, in deciding issues of war or peace. We do not seek special privileges, but we demand as a human right a full voice and role for women in determining the destiny of our world, our nation, our families and our individual lives.

Control | Destiny | Family | Ideas | Individual | Individuality | Infancy | Life | Life | Majority | Man | Occupation | Peace | Position | Power | Public | Right | War | Wisdom | Woman | World |

Albert Einstein

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

Ideas | Language | Rule | Science | Wisdom |

Ilya Ehrenburg, fully Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg

I have come to hate war not only because it kills off the flower of every nation, but because it destroys spiritual as well as material values.

Hate | War | Wisdom |