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

John M. Wilson, fully John Moulder Wilson

Are you willing to think? Consider carefully, for the answer to that question will largely determine your success or failure in life. If you develop your judgment, use it. Exercise your power of judgment as often as you can, for the first rule of good judgment is practice. The functions of your mind, no less than the muscles of your body, receive their strength through repeated use.

Body | Failure | Good | Judgment | Life | Life | Mind | Power | Practice | Question | Receive | Rule | Strength | Success | Will | Wisdom | Failure |

Chinua Achebe, formally Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe

After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.

Life | Life | War |

Hans Albrecht Bethe

If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.

Fighting | History | Ideals | War | Will |

Albert Einstein

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

Cause | Reason | Soul | Strength |

Zhou Dunyi, also Chou Tun-i or Zhou Dunshi

Only the intelligent can understand what is obvious and what is concealed. Strength may be good or it may be evil. The same is true of weakness. The ideal is moderation… Purify the heart; that is all.

Evil | Good | Heart | Moderation | Strength | Weakness | Understand |

Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

Power | War | World |

Christian Century Editorial NULL

The ancient theory of the just war breaks down when victory is impossible, when the weapons are so undiscriminating as to destroy both sides.

Destroy | War | Weapons |

Gregg Braden

It is through the strength of our physical body, the wisdom of our heart’s experience, and the purity of our intention that we determine the quality of our life.

Body | Experience | Heart | Intention | Life | Life | Purity | Strength | Wisdom |

Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley

We have too many men of science, and too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical midgets. We know more about war than we know of peace, more about killing than we know about living.

Conscience | God | Men | Mystery | Peace | Power | Science | War | Wisdom | World |

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No man in a thousand has the strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an atheist.

Heart | Man | Mind | Strength |

Norman F. Dixon

Those very characteristics which are demanded by war – the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having a mind open to the receipt of novel, and perhaps threatening information – are the antitheses of those possessed by people attracted to the controls, and orderliness, of militarism.

Ability | Action | Mind | Orderliness | People | Thought | Uncertainty | War | Thought |

Angus Dun and Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

The occasions to which the concept of the just war can be rightly applied have become highly restricted. A war to “defend the victims of wanton aggression” where the demands of justice join the demands of order, is today the clearer case of a just war… The concept of a just war does not provide moral justification for initiating a war of incalculable consequences to end such oppression.

Aggression | Consequences | Justice | Justification | Oppression | Order | War |

Zhou En-lai, also Chou En Lai

All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.

Diplomacy | Means | War |

Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. What man's mind can create, man's character can control.

Character | Day | Death | Force | Man | Mind | Order | Science | Torture | War | Will |

Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré

A person [man] who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. People court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom to be relieved of fear and frustration.

Fear | Life | Life | Peace | People | War |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

Is there really as much difference as we think between the Aztec human sacrifices to their gods and the modern human sacrifices in war to the idols of nationalism and the sovereign state?

War | Think |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

Lust | Power | Strength | Weakness |

W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester

Every war of the future will be a war of religion, for no country will go to war till it can give its cause the color of a Crusade and so secure for its maintenance absolute loyalty of a heroic quality in the whole population.

Absolute | Cause | Future | Loyalty | Loyalty | Religion | War | Will |