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

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

No matter what your profession – doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant – if you are an American, you better be good at the touchy-feely service stuff, because anything that can be digitized can be outsourced to either the smartest or the cheapest producer.

Important | Order | People | World |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

No policy is sustainable without a public that broadly understands why it's necessary and sees the world the way you do...

Absence | Better | Children | Global | Hate | Humanity | Kill | Knowledge | Men | Murder | News | Order | Peace | Religion | Self-realization | Terrorism | Thought | War | Murder | Thought |

Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz

What the psychiatrist calls a “delusion of persecution” is one of the most dramatic human defenses against the feeling of personal insignificance and worthlessness. In fact, no one cares a hoot about Jones. He is an extra on the stage of life. But he wants to be a star.

Evil | Order |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand

Waiting |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

A vision without resources is an hallucination.

Courage | Waiting |

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession.

Day | Duty | Good | Hope | Impression | Little | Manliness | Thinking | Waiting |

Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

Men | Order | Problems | Thinking | World | Trouble |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.

Friend | Order | Present |

Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.

Order | Spirit |

Thucydides NULL

Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action... So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives. For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy's onset.

Aid | Good | Order | Friends |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power. United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance and your united aid. The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves—to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted.

Business | Little | Men | Order | Quiet | Time | World | Business | Learn |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.

Hope | Order | Spirit | World |

Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away.

Deference | Order | Solitude | Leadership |

Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing

Order |

Hugh Blair

He who goes no further than bare justice, stops at the beginning of virtue.

Important | Order | Right | Spirit | Truth |

Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren

There are still people who believe in that and wake up every day believing it's possible, and invest their whole selves in that.

Dishonesty | Existence | Order | Sense |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don’t do nothin’ but confuse the puddin’ out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you? It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.

Lying | Man | Order | Trust | Will |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. But say you've inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it's soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that.

Control | Fate | Order | Price | Protest | Weakness | Will | Fate |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

In referring to her earlier statement that he had was not her type because he was a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace.

Authority | Order |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

Okay, we have just passed through the Michener zone, and , assuming that narcolepsy hasn’t leadened our lids, that we’ve not been Lao-this’d and Lao-that’ed into a comatose state, we’re now in a position, as we rejoin the narrative flow, to conclude that Fan Nan Nan was a Lao Theung community. Are we not?

Happy | People | Waiting | World | Vice |