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

Menachem Begin

The hour of decision has arrived. You know what I have done, and what all of us have done. to prevent war and bereavement. But our fate is that in the Land of Israel there is no escape from fighting in the spirit of self-sacrifice. Believe me, the alternative to fighting is Treblinka, and we have resolved that there would be no Treblinkas. This is the moment in which courageous choice has to be made. The criminal terrorists and the world must know that the Jewish people have a right to self-defense, just like any other people.

Choice | Decision | Fate | Fighting | Land | People | Right | Spirit | War | World | Fate |

Michael Parenti

To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Safe | Security | World |

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

Money, security and comfort may be necessary to make us happy, but they are definitely not sufficient.

Comfort | Security |

Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

Freedom is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek permission for their action only from their own conscience and reason, and to be determined in their actions only by their own will, and consequently to be responsible only to themselves, and then to the society to which they belong, but only insofar as they have made a free decision to belong to it.

Absolute | Action | Conscience | Decision | Men | Right | Society | Society |

Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman

I believe Mackey’s flat statement that “corporate philanthropy is a good thing” is flatly wrong. Consider the decision by the founders of Whole Foods to donate 5 percent of net profits to philanthropy. They were clearly within their rights in doing so. They were spending their own money.…But what reason is there to suppose that the stream of profit distributed in this way would do more good for society than investing that stream of profit in the enterprise itself or paying it out as dividends and letting the stockholders dispose of it? The practice makes sense only because of our obscene tax laws, whereby a stockholder can make a larger gift for a given after-tax cost if the corporation makes the gift on his behalf than if he makes the gift directly. That is a good reason for eliminating the corporate tax or for eliminating the deductibility of corporate charity, but it is not a justification for corporate charity.

Cost | Decision | Good | Justification | Philanthropy | Practice | Reason | Rights | Sense | Society | Society |

Elizabeth Fry, fully Elizabeth "Betsy" Fry, née Gurney

Does Capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means. It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them; it renders life insecure, inasmuch as the law holds out that Property is of greater value than life.

Capital punishment | Law | Life | Life | Light | Property | Punishment | Security | Loss | Value |

Mustapha Mahmoud

A man who stepped quarter of a million miles in space to the moon was unable to step length, a few meters of assisted his colleagues are dying of hunger in India and other Ashakhm injustice in Jerusalem, Vietnam .. and America meets Russia to brighten up the moon and fail to meet them in the Security Council. and escape from that soul and to Atbha space universe where the laws of God to rely on accurate it is safe and easy .. A thousand times easier than observing i'tikaaf rights on the same repairs and He should work out .. but at the same time escape from man's first message on the ground... To know himself and He should work out. Thought and religion and science together make man himself... The physical science alone, without faith and without creating not only made ​​from the same arrogant and distorted deformity giant moving between planets and invent a terrible terrible weapons of mass murder by destroying the All, and then destroys himself without knowing it.

Faith | God | Hunger | Injustice | Injustice | Knowing | Man | Murder | Religion | Rights | Safe | Science | Security | Soul | Space | Thought | Time | Universe | Weapons | Work | God | Murder | Thought |

Murray Bookchin

This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of ‘revolutionizing themselves and things,’ much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People’s Labor Party ‘revolutionaries’ is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of ‘proletarian morality’ replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little ‘Red Book’ and other sacred litanies.

Conservatism | Discipline | Dogma | Evidence | Labor | Little | Obedience | Sacred | Security | Society | Thought | Work | Society | Leader | Old | Thought |

N. Scott Momaday, fully Navarre Scott Momaday

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.

Language | Security | Words | Writing |

Murray D. Lincoln, fully Murray Danforth Lincoln

People believe that through the American way of life they can work together to encourage wider ownership of economic activities. In this way, they believe they can develop an economy of abundance which will provide a maximum of security and freedom.

Abundance | Life | Life | Security | Will | Work |

Nathaniel Branden

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

Ability | Knowledge | Rest | Security | World |

Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Freedom would be meaningless without security in the home and in the streets.

Security |

Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Safety and security don't just happen; they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear.

Life | Life | Public | Security |

Neil Kurshan

Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.

Children | Family | Order | People | Rebellion | Security | Thought | Child | Thought |

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

Love is never a relationship, and relationship is never love. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. Relationship is a dead thing, a closed thing. Love is a flowing. Relationship may be just out of fear, may not have anything to do with love. Relationship may be just a kind of security — financial or something else. The relationship is needed only because love is not there. Relationship is a substitute. Become alert! Relationship destroys love, destroys the very possibility of its birth.

Love | Relationship | Security |

Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend

A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction, he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions, but also entire world view, he is the inventor of entire forms of like.

Care | Rationality | Security | World | Child |

Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan

If America is about anything, she is about freedom. We have seen in the burgeoning Department of Homeland Security and at our airports and in the color-coded alerts the beginning of the erosion of that freedom.

Beginning | Security |

Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend

It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, 'objectivity', 'truth', it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.

Circumstances | Man | Order | Security | Will |

Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend

It is evident, on the basis of our considerations, that this appearance of success cannot in the least be regarded as a sign of truth and correspondence with nature. Quite the contrary, suspicion arises that the absence of major difficulties is a result of the decrease of empirical content brought about by the elimination of alternatives, and of facts that can be discovered with their help. In other words, the suspicion arises that this alleged success is due to the fact that the theory, when extended beyond its starting point, was turned into rigid ideology. Such Ideology is "successful" not because it agrees so well with the facts; it is successful because no facts have been specified that could constitute a test, and because some such facts have been removed. Its "success" is entirely man-made. It was decided to stick to some ideas, come what may, and the result was, quite naturally, the survival of these ideas. If now the initial decision is forgotten, or made only implicitly, for example, if it becomes common law in physics, then the survival itself will seem to constitute independent support., it will reinforce the decision, or turn it into an explicate one, and in this way close the circle. This is how empirical "evidence" may be created by a procedure which quotes as its justification the very same evidence it has produced.

Absence | Appearance | Decision | Evidence | Justification | Law | Success | Survival | Suspicion | Truth | Will |

Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin

I have come to an unalterable decision – to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.

Decision | Eternal | Peace | Struggle | Tomorrow |