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

Erwin Rommel, fully Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel

The future battle on the ground will be preceded by battle in the air. This will determine which of the contestants has to suffer operational and tactical disadvantages and be forced throughout the battle into adoption compromise solutions.

Art | Enemy | Strength | Time | Art |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

We have indeed labored to make some of the capital which today helps us to produce – a large fund of scientific, technological, and other knowledge; an elaborate physical infrastructure; innumerable types of sophisticated capital equipment, etc. – but all this is but a small part of the total capital we are using. Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man – and we do not even recognize it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate, and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal error to believe, and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved.

Convictions | Faith | Heart | Ideas | Mind | Reason | War |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The poor can be helped to help themselves, but only by making available to them a technology that recognizes the economic boundaries and limitations of poverty—an intermediate technology.

Strength |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Our universities produced lawyers and doctors for the old social system, but did not create enough agricultural extension teachers, agronomists, chemists, or physicists. In fact, we do not even have mathematicians.

Action | Battle | Death | Enemy | Men | Unity | War |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.

Age | Civilization | Courage | Fear | Good | Nothing | Question | Strength |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.

Life | Life | Strength |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

His wife spotted the danger in our resolutely bohemian ways. You have only one year left before you qualify as a doctor and yet you're going away? You have no idea when you'll be back? But why? We couldn't give precise answers to her desperate questions and this horrified her.

Inevitable | War |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

Supposing I was to tell you that it's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I've read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on — in quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon?

Gold | Race | Strength |

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

There is only one thing to do — take it to the country!

Incompetence | Life | Life | People | Success | System | War |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ...Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

Age | Duty | History | War | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.

Doubt | War |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

They are distorted, deformed, hideous mentally and morally. Their trade is treason, their breath is pollution and yet the officials of the C.B.&Q. formed a conspiracy with these professional liars, perjurers, cut-throats and murderers to overcome a strike, the result of a policy of flagrant injustice.

Duty | Government | Talking | Time | War | Government |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most--that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

Conquest | History | War |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

If you go to the city of Washington, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of congress, and mis-representatives of the masses claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad that I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.

Right | War |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

War |

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

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Justify | Order | War | Will |

Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen

When I face an issue of great import that cleaves both constituents and colleagues, I always take the same approach. I engage in deep deliberation and quiet contemplation. I wait to the last available minute and then I always vote with the losers. Because, my friend, the winners never remember and the losers never forget.

Strength |