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

Walter Bagehot

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

Scripture | Truth | Will |

Walter Lippmann

In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.

Government | Luxury | Men | News | Office | Passion | Public | Sentiment | Truth | Vehemence | Wrong | Government | Trial |

Walter Lippmann

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.

Comfort | Means | Policy | Public | Truth |

Walter Lippmann

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

News | Truth |

Walter Lippmann

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.

Good | Order | Principles | Reason | Sense | Society | Truth | Society |

Walter Lippmann

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.

Light | Men | News | Reality | Truth |

Walter Brueggemann

We know about the exodus deliverance, but we do not take notice that slavery occurred by the manipulation of the economy in the interest of a concentration of wealth and power for the few at the expense of the community.

Cost | Truth | Work |

Walter Savage Landor

Be always displeased at what thou art, if thou desire to attain to what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest.

Contentment | Truth | Happiness |

Walter Savage Landor

In church they are taught to love God; after church they are practised to love their neighbor.

Falsehood | Truth |

Walter Savage Landor

The happiest of pillows is not that which love first presses! it is that which death has frowned on and passed over.

Fear | Flattery | Language | Truth |

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.

Behavior | Good | Harm | Mind | Plenty | Rest | Rumor | Story | Thought | Truth | Waiting | Words | Old | Think | Thought |

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.

Belief | Gold | Past | Price | Truth | Will |

Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.

Good | Important | Truth | World |

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis. As 'bandwagon' investors join any party, they create their own truth — for a while.

Policy | Truth | War | World |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

You leave old habits behind by starting out with the thought, 'I release the need for this in my life'.

Power | Truth | Will |

Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

In the West reintegration was sporadic, but in recent years it has become a widespread preoccupation. Unfortunately its technical dependence on oriental literature - sometimes translated by scholars whose knowledge of the language was greater than their understanding of the subject - has proved a barrier which rendered full comprehension laborious and exceedingly long. Therefore it appears to be essential that such teaching as may be transmissible shall be given in a modern idiom and in accordance with our own processes of thought. But this presentation can never be given by the discursive method to which we are used for the acquisition of conceptual knowledge, for the understanding required is not conceptual and therefore is not knowledge.

Order | Truth |

Wei Jingsheng or Jing-sheng

I've waited decades for this chance to exercise my rights to free speech. But the Chinese people have been waiting for centuries.

Revolution | Truth | World |

Wendell Berry

In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree.

Citizenship | Commerce | Enemy | Family | Freedom | Health | Individual | Life | Life | Majority | Mind | People | Power | Property | Society | Truth | Wealth | Will | Society | Commerce | Learn | Value |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

Darkness | Important | People | Silence | Truth |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Lying | Truth |