Great Throughts Treasury

"Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"It has always seemed to me that ruthlessness and arrogant self-confidence constitute the indispensable condition for what, when it succeeds, strike us as greatness. And I also believe that one ought to differentiate between greatness of achievement and greatest of personality." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Our lack of compassion, our ruthlessness towards other men, is an impenetrable curtain between ourselves and God." - Alexander Yelchaninov

"Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shame, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision." -

"Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shame, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision." -

"Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shame, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision." -

"The riddle of the universe is not so simple. There is the aspect of permanence in which a given type of attainment is endlessly repeated for its own sake; and there is the aspect of transition to other things - it may be of higher worth and it may be of lower worth. Also there are aspects of struggle and of friendly help. But romantic ruthlessness is no nearer to real politics, than is romantic self-abnegation." - Alfred North Whitehead

"A certain ruthlessness is essential, particularly with inefficiency and also with those who would waste his time. People will accept this provided the leader is ruthless with himself." - Bernard Law "Monty" Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein

"In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes - courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless." - Eric Hoffer

"We are society; we are not independent of society. We are the result of the environment - of our religion, of our education, of the climate, of the food we eat, the reactions, the innumerable repetitive activities that we indulge in every day. That is our life. And the society in which we live is part of that life. Society is relationship between man and man. Society is cooperation. Society, as it is, is the result of man's greed, hatred, ambition, competition, brutality, cruelty, ruthlessness - and we live in that pattern. And to understand it - not intellectually, not merely theoretically, but actually - we have to come into contact directly with that fact, which is, a human being - that is you - is the result of this social environment, its economic pressure, religious upbringing, and so on. To come into contact with anything directly is not to verbalize it but to look at it." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"It is easier to tell our therapist about our sex life than it is to tell our accountant about our finances." - Vicki Robin