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

Moshe Schwab

When we pray, we should feel the seriousness of speaking directly to the Almighty. The concept of seriousness should not be mistaken for sadness since sadness is a transgression. Seriousness should stem from the true joy of fulfilling a mitzvah [biblical law or good deed], the joy of having the merit to pray to the Almighty.

Character | Good | Joy | Law | Merit | Sadness |

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 |

John Hay Allison

Truth is the disciple of the ascetic, the quest of the mystic, the faith of the simple, the ransom of the weak, the standard of the righteous, the doctrine of the meek, and the challenge of Nature. Together, all these constitute the Law of the Universe.

Challenge | Doctrine | Faith | Law | Nature | Truth | Universe | Wisdom |

Berthold Auerbach

Only he is free who cultivates his own thoughts... and strives without fear of man to do justice to them.

Fear | Justice | Man | Wisdom |

Carl William Ackerman

Facts, when combined with ideas, constitute the greatest force in the world. They are greater than armaments, greater than finance, greater than science, business and law because they constitute the common denominator of all of them.

Business | Force | Ideas | Law | Science | Wisdom | World | Business |

Washington Allston

Never expect justice from a vain man; if he has the negative magnanimity not to disparage you, it is the most you can expect.

Justice | Magnanimity | Man | Wisdom |

Robert C. Winthrop,fully Robert Charles Winthrop

Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise, - all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free.

Character | Dignity | Education | Ignorance | Justice | Slavery | Wisdom |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

Justice is unstable and changeable? No, but the times over which justice presides are not alike, for they are times.

Justice | Wisdom |

Caleb Afendopolo

He never taught any law or practice contrary to the Written Law. Only after his death... many of his disciples introduced practices and doctrines altogether foreign to him, removing thereby the cornerstone of the Law while winning the multitudes.

Death | Law | Practice | Wisdom | Winning |

Harry Weinberger

The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. If the Government or majorities think an individual is right, no one will interfere with him; but when agitators talk against the things considered holy, or when radicals criticise, or satirize the political gods, or question the justice of our laws and institutions, or pacifists talk against war, how the old inquisition awakens, and ostracism, the excommunication of the church, the prison, the wheel, the torture-chamber, the mob, are called to suppress the free expression of thought.

Character | Government | Individual | Justice | Question | Right | Will | Wisdom | World | Wrong | Government | Old | Think |

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 |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

The people... is an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of right and by a community of interests... Where there is no true justice there can be no right.

Justice | People | Right | Wisdom |

Catharine Trotter Cockburn

Even granting the author [Rutherford]... his main principle, ‘That every man’s own happiness is the ultimate end, which nature and reason teach him to pursue’, why may not nature and reason teach him, too, to have some desire to see others happy as well as himself, or give him some delight in doing what seems fit and right, if these things do not interfere with his own happiness?... Why may he not, with the pursuit of that end, join some other pursuits not inconsistent with it, instead of transforming every benevolent affection, every moral view, into self-interest? This surely neither does honour to religion, nor justice to human nature.

Character | Desire | Happy | Human nature | Justice | Man | Nature | Reason | Religion | Right | Self | Self-interest | Teach | Happiness |

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 |

Antiphon NULL

Many duties imposed by law are hostile to nature.

Law | Nature | Wisdom |