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

Václav Havel

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.

Authority | Awareness | Capacity | Earth | Honor | Hope | Nothing | Order | People | Respect | Right | Rights | Will | World | Respect | Awareness | Value |

Václav Havel

Poles are able to reflect their history, they respect it. Who knows if anybody will remember when we commemorate our 25 years [since the 1989 Velvet Revolution].

Authority | History | Meaning | Space | Time | World | Value |

Václav Havel

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Defense |

Vannevar Bush

All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses— the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that someday the path may be established more directly?

Conservation | Defense | Knowledge | Learning | Leisure | Man | Means | Objectives | Position | Science | Will | World | Leadership |

Václav Havel

I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate.

Desire | Education | Focus | Future | Will |

Václav Havel

It has become clear that the legacy of the past decades we have to cope with is even worse than we anticipated or could anticipate in the joyful atmosphere of those first weeks of freedom. New problems are emerging day by day, and we can see how interconnected they are, how long it takes to solve them, and how difficult it is to establish priorities.

Change | Global | Purpose | Purpose | Spirit | Understanding | Will |

Václav Havel

The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.

Ideas | Salvation | World |

Thomas Love Peacock

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book — it is a plaything.

Defense | Foreign policy | Government | Policy | Government |

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

Defense | Fortune | Sense |

Thurgood Marshall

A child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi . . . has the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.

Capital punishment | Danger | Defense | Failure | Insanity | Punishment | Danger | Failure |

William Shakespeare

Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth in strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed by the imprisoning of unruly wind within the womb, which, for enlargement striving, shakes the old beldame earth and topples down steeples and mossgrown towers. King Henry IV. Part I. Act iii. Sc. 1.

Wit |

William James

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

Body | Organic | Value |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

A great many men — some comparatively small men now — if put in the right position, would be Luthers and Columbuses.

Competition | Love | Men | Opportunity |

Edward Scribner Ames

It may be said that the supreme revelation is to be found in Jesus Christ and that all the rest of the Bible leads up to him. Yet there are two ways of accepting the words and example of Jesus. One is to take what he says as true because he says it, and another is to believe it because it stands the test of reflection and experience. When his way of life has been confirmed by the demands of intelligence and of practical life, it has gained the deepest security and made its strongest claims upon our loyalty.

Association | Change | Divinity | Ideas | Life | Life | Nature | People | Psychology | Sense | Sin | Strength | Association |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

Our message is clear. We count. Children count. Everybody counts, so count everybody,

Better | Equality | Example | Family | Organization |

Elif Safak

Sometimes ... yaralanıveririz so suddenly. But every wound will heal itself. Eventually heals, top off. Stored in the eyes. Does not want to be seen because there is no wound. As long as they advocate the wound pupils. Because if pupils are injured, you cannot look the world in the same way ever again. You start to see the bad side of everything you look at. Contaminants that have remained hidden even run away from his eyes. Did not see things that other people feel the same anymore and you do not love them anymore. Uncomfortable. They cannot look you in the same way again. This is close to you, so no one wants to see. Picture the same image, in fact, changing your eyes. If you walk out the picture, everything remains as before, not everyone is comfortable. Personally, I think it is best to go in such situations. Top go to the top. Out of spite.

Consciousness | Duty | God | Individual | Morality | Rule | God | Learn |

Ellen Goodman

As for keeping the attack dogs from nibbling away your courage? My theory, after decades in this business, is that you only give a few people the right to make you feel rotten. You have a handful of chits to give out, penuriously, to those you trust and respect. You don't give them to just anyone with an e-mail address and an epithet.

Battle | Children | Opposition | Parents | Time |

Elizabeth Gould Davis

Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist.

Defense | Men | Woman | Worry |

Elyn Saks

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was ‘gravely disabled.’ To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.

Defense | Mind | Problems |

Emile Zola

It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.

Crime | Defense | Existence | Important | Justification | War |