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

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

TV is now so desperately hungry for material that theyÂ’re scraping the top of the barrel.

Society | Society | Think |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

What the workingmen of the country are profoundly interested in is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the enslaving and degrading wage-system in which they toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest — this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it. As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.

Age | Awakening | Conquest | Duty | Glory | History | Nothing | Object | Reason | War | Wealth | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.

Fate | Life | Life | Fate |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, "I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned." And I said, You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?

Price | Proletariat | Question | Right | System |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earthÂ…and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the readerÂ’s attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness.

Evil | Freedom | Happy | History | People | Purpose | Purpose |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

Battle | Criticism | Day | Life | Life | Literature | Nothing | Order | Present | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

Challenge | Truth | Think |

Eugenio Montale

The man of today has inherited a nervous system that cannot stand the current living conditions. Waiting to form the man of tomorrow, today's man reacts to the changed conditions by not objecting to shock but doing mass massificandosi.

Future | Man | System | Will |

Euripedes NULL

The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.

Action | Happy | Life | Life | Mortal |

Euripedes NULL

The man who glories in his luck may be overthrown by destiny.

Day | Man |

Euripedes NULL

What mortal claims, by searching to the utmost limit, to have found out the nature of God, or of his opposite, or of that which comes between, seeing as he doth this world of man tossed to and fro by waves of contradiction and strange vicissitudes?

Enemy | Man |

Eustace Budgell

If I was put to define modesty, I would call it the reflection of an ingenuous mind, either when a man has committed an action for which he censures himself, or fancies that he is exposed to the censure of others.

Eugenio Montale

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Man | System | Waiting |

Euripedes NULL

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.

Man | Struggle | Will |

Euripedes NULL

What other creatures are bred so exquisitely and purposefully for mistreatment as women are?

Contradiction | Man | Mortal | Nature | World |

Eustace Budgell

I find but few beards worth taking notice of in the reign of King James the First.

Boys | Education | Genius | Good | Man | Memory | Mind | Nothing | Will |