Great Throughts Treasury

"Schools exploit you because they tap your power and use it to perpetuate society’s trip, while they teach you not to respect your own... Schools petrify society because their method, characterized by coercion from the top down, works against any substantial social change... Schools petrify society because students, through them, learn to adjust unquestioningly to institutions." - Jerry Farber

"When the Copernican Revolution superseded the ancient Polemic world view, the earth took its rightful place as one planet among many. Man was no longer the center of the universe and though his self-image was deflated, he grew in maturity. In the same way, we must take our rightful place in nature - not as its self-centered and profligate "master" with the divine right of kings to exploit and despoil, but as one species living in harmony with the whole." - R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing

"Butterfield, Empire is neither built nor maintained without some strokes of hard policy and with the generation of deep resentments. And if we are sometimes exasperated by officialdom even at home, can we imagine what must be the reaction of awakening minds in regions where the officialdom represents the foreigner, and the foreigner is in the country also to exploit it?" - Herbert Butterfield, fully Sir Herbert Butterfield

"Learning, then controlling, is limited by only two things: by our mind’s capabilities and the constraints of the universe. Learning how to progressively exploit our environment will not stop until life itself ceases… life explores and exploits its inherited options." - David Hockey

"Life learns how to exploit and control its environment by perceiving, investigating, understanding, then utilizing the relationships that exist between objects and events. This is possible because the universe is causally constructed." - David Hockey

"Those whom we cannot exploit we denounce as selfish." - Paul Eldridge

"Our best hope, both of a tolerable political harmony and of an inner peace, rests upon our ability to observe the limits of human freedom even while we responsibly exploit its creative possibilities." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

"Only those who have experienced ultimate not-knowing, the voicelessness of a soul struck by wonder, total muteness, are able to enter the meaning of God, a meaning greater than the mind. There is a loneliness in us that hears. When the soul parts from the company of the ego and its retinue of petty concepts; when we cease to exploit all things but instead pray the world’s cry, the world’s sigh, our loneliness may hear the living grace beyond all power." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it." - Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz

"For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other’s good intentions." - Margaret Thatcher, fully Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, née Roberts

"As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

"It is above all the valorizing of the present that requires emphasizing. The simple fact of existing, of living in time, can comprise a religious dimension. This dimension is not always obvious, since sacrality is in a sense camouflaged in the immediate, in the "natural" and the everyday. The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing — even fugitively — in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant." - Mircea Eliade

"Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"The first – and usually the best – opportunity for successful change is to exploit one’s own successes and build on them. Problems cannot be ignored. And serious problems have to be taken care of. But to be change leaders, enterprises have to focus on opportunities. They have to starve problems and feed opportunities." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"A time of turbulence is one of great opportunity for those who can understand, accept, and exploit the new realities. One constant theme is, therefore, the need for the decision maker in the individual enterprise to face up to reality and resist the temptation of what "everybody knows," the temptations of the certainties of yesterday, which are about to become of deleterious superstitions of tomorrow. To manage in turbulent times, therefore, means to face up to the new realities. It means starting with the question: "What is the world really like?" rather than the assertions or assumptions that made sense only a few years ago." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose? " - Peter Singer

"Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends. Brought up as we have been on the 'good of the species' view of evolution, we naturally think first of liars and deceivers as belonging to different species: predators, prey, parasites, and so on. However, we must expect lies and deceit, and selfish exploitation of communication to arise whenever the interests of the genes of different individuals diverge. This will include individuals of the same species. As we shall see, we must even expect that children will deceive their parents, that husbands will cheat on wives, and that brother will lie to brother." - Richard Dawkins

"Expanding the scope of trade so as to exploit cheaper resources or labor. Both of these strategies have deep and ancient roots in human history." - Richard Heinberg

"I believe that it is my responsibility as the prime minister of Israel to do whatever can be done to exploit the unique opportunities that lie ahead of us to move towards peace. Not everything can be done by one act. " - Yitzhak Shamir, born Icchak Jaziernicki

"A comprehended god is no god" - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom

"Ordinary people feel they cannot live without their wealth, although their possession of it is circumstantial and temporary." - Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL

"Much can be done by law towards putting women on a footing of complete and entire equal rights with man - including the right to vote, the right to hold and use property, and the right to enter any profession she desires on the same terms as the man... Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"I do not have to stop the flow of events in order to understand them. On the contrary, I must move with them or else what I think I understand will be no more than an image in my own mind." - Thomas Merton

"If, as it appears, it was an act of terrorists, then we will do everything in our power to track them down and hold them accountable." - William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen

"A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy." - Wendell Berry

"For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land." - Wendell Berry

"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free." - Wendell Berry

"We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?" - Wendell Berry

"Angelique, with both hands open, lying limply on her knees, was giving herself. And Felicien remembered the evening on which she had run barefoot through the grass, so adorable that he had pursued her, and whispered in her ear, I love you. And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, I love you. And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, I love you, the eternal cry that had finally emerged from her wide-open heart. I love you... Take me, carry me away, I am yours." - Emile Zola

"Let us... quietly accept our times, with the firm conviction that just as much good can be done today as at any time in the past, provided only that we have the will and the way to do it." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice." - Evgeny Morozov

"A genius with the IQ of a moron." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo?s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"For the time will soon come when Hobbits will shape the fortunes of all." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Having the romantic upbringing, I made a boy-and-girl affair serious, and made it the source of effort. - On his romance with Edith" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien