Great Throughts Treasury

"The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"We have got to begin a vast reclamation project to revitalize religion for those to whom it means little or nothing. This can be done not by trying to persuade those outside the church to believe what we believe but by pointing out to them the presence of the unrecognized religion that already exists in their lives." - Theodore C. Speers

"A just war is in the long run far better for a nation's soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence in wrong or injustice." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The good citizen is the man who, whatever his wealth or his poverty, strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to his family, to his neighbor, to the States; who is incapable of the baseness which manifests itself either in arrogance or in envy, but who while demanding justice for himself is no less scrupulous to do justice to others." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Every one of us needs a home. The world needs a home. There are so many young people who are homeless. They may have a building to live in, but they are homeless in their hearts. That is why the most important practice of our time is to give each person a home. When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Many of us are not capable of releasing the past, of releasing the suffering of the past. We want to cling to our own suffering." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The Buddha's teachings on love are clear. It is possible to live twenty-four hours a day in a state of love. Every movement, every glance, every thought, and every word can be infused with love." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"This is a very important practice. Live your daily life in a way that you never lose yourself. When you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself. The practice is always to go back to oneself." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"When we are angry, our anger is our very self. To suppress or chase away our anger is to suppress or chase away ourselves. When anger is born, we can be aware that anger is an energy in us, and we can change that energy into another kind of energy. If we want to transform it, first we have to know how to accept it." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Words and thoughts concerning compassionate action that are not put into practice are like beautiful flowers that are colorful but have no fragrance." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The barrier between the western mode of consciousness and the natural world, and the consequent ethical deficiency in western conscience, began in some manner with the biblical emphasis on the perception of the divine in historical events rather than within cosmological manifestation. The entire biblical experience could be described as a movement from the cosmological to the historical which began with the Exodus experience. It was further strengthened by the historical redemption experience of Christianity; then by the emphasis on the human mode of being in the Greek humanist tradition. When in modem centuries the scientists gave us a natural world that came into being by purely random processes and without any spiritual meaning then the alienation of the human from the natural world was complete." - Thomas Berry

"There is an ultimate wildness in all this, for the universe, as existence itself, is a terrifying as well as a benign mode of being. If it grants us amazing powers over much of its functioning we must always remember that any arrogance on our part will ultimately be called to account. The beginning of wisdom in any human activity is a certain reverence before the primordial mystery of existence, for the world about us is a fearsome mode of being. We do not judge the universe." - Thomas Berry

"To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth rather than of treaty processes or even of inter-cultural understanding. Simply to recognize the basic nature and dimension of the issues we face is already an advance. But if a peaceful world is beyond politics it is also beyond religions as these presently exist. A change is needed in every phase of human life. This lies mainly in recognition that the micro phase, the particular or national traditions, must find their context and fulfillment in the macro phase, the global or panhuman phase of human existence. The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will find both support and fulfillment in a functional global community." - Thomas Berry

"To think that we can have a viable human economy by destroying the earth economy is absurd." - Thomas Berry

"As fish in the water love deep places and wells and are most frequently found there, so wicked men have a great love to carnal security and have no will to strive against the stream. Fish love deep places best where there is least noise. Oh, how careful are natural men to keep all quiet, that there may be nothing to disturb them in their rest in sin! They love to be secure which is their destruction. O my soul, beware of carnal security, of being secure, though plunged over head and ears in sin." - Thomas Boston

"Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains." - Thomas Carlyle

"Genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains." - Thomas Carlyle

"Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself." - Thomas Carlyle

"It sufficiently appeareth that in a commonwealth, a subject that has no certain and assured revelation particularly to himself concerning the will of God, is to obey for such, the command of the commonwealth: for if men were at liberty to take for God's commandments their own dreams and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men, scarce two men would agree upon what is God's commandment, and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the commandments of the commonwealth." - Thomas Hobbes

"Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself." - Thomas Merton

"In the end, it's the reality of personal relationships that save everything." - Thomas Merton

"O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen." - Thomas Merton

"The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life." - Thomas Merton

"The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done" - Thomas Merton

"There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done ‘for the common good.’ As an example, one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, king, tolerant, civilized and even humane. But they have acquired a special deformity of conscience as a result of their identification with their group, their immersion in their particular society. This deformation is the price they pay to forget and to exorcise that solitude which seems to them to be a demon." - Thomas Merton

"Though there is no use in placing our hopes on a totally utopian new world in which everyone is sublimely merciful, we are obliged to seek some way of giving the mercy and compassion a social, even a political, dimension. The eschatological function of mercy, we repeat, is to prepare the transformation of the world, and to usher in the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is manifestly “not of this world”, but it demands to be typified and prepared by such forms of heroic social witness that makes mercy plain and evident in the world… mercy must discover, in faith, in the Spirit, a power strong enough to initiate the transformation of the world into a realm of understanding, unity and relative peace, where mankind, nations and societies are willing to make the enormous sacrifices required if they are to communicate intelligibly with one another, understand one another, cooperate with one another in feeding the hungry millions and in building a world of peace." - Thomas Merton

"To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him." - Thomas Merton

"Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity." - Thomas Merton

"The essence of politics is compromise." - Thomas Macaulay, fully Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

"Article 11 - The General Assembly may consider the general principles of co-operation in the maintenance of international peace and security, including the principles governing disarmament and the regulation of armaments, and may make recommendations with regard to such principles to the Members or to the Security Council or to both. The General Assembly may discuss any questions relating to the maintenance of international peace and security brought before it by any Member of the United Nations, or by the Security Council, or by a state which is not a Member of the United Nations in accordance with Article 35, paragraph 2, and, except as provided in Article 12, may make recommendations with regard to any such questions to the state or states concerned or to the Security Council or to both. Any such question on which action is necessary shall be referred to the Security Council by the General Assembly either before or after discussion. The General Assembly may call the attention of the Security Council to situations which are likely to endanger international peace and security." - United Nations NULL

"Faith in all its sheer simplicity! Faith that takes God precisely at His Word! Faith that simply says, "Thank You."" - W. Ian Thomas, fully Walter Ian Thomas

"Make sure it is God's trumpet you are blowing- if it is only yours it won't wake the dead, it will simply disturb the neighbours." - W. Ian Thomas, fully Walter Ian Thomas

"Men ardently pursue truth, assuming it will be angels' bread when found." - W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon

"The sustained inability to clarify what the word 'religion' signifies, in itself suggests that the term ought to be dropped; that it is a distorted concept not really corresponding to anything definite or distinctive in the objective world. The phenomena we call religious undoubtedly exist. Yet perhaps the notion that they constitute in themselves some distinctive entity is an unwarranted analysis... an alternative suggestion could be that a failure to agree on definitions of religion may well stem from the quality of the material. For what a man thinks about religion is central to what he thinks about life and the universe as a whole. The meaning that one ascribes to the term is a key to the meaning that one finds in existence." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith

"If the mind loves solitude, it has thereby acquired a loftier character, and it becomes still more noble when the taste is indulged in." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the painter or sculptor. ... That proposition does not admit of discussion. It is a product of the intellectual innocence which I think we surgeons may fairly claim to possess, and which is happily not inconsistent with a quite adequate worldly wisdom." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter

"Honest pioneer work in the field of science has always been, and will continue to be, life’s pilot. On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation." - Wilhelm Reich

"Or does this thought relate to things to come in the future? I request my right and privilege to have such thoughts and ask such questions without being threatened to be jailed by any administrative agency of society…In the face of a rigid, doctrinaire, self-appointed, ready-to-kill hierarchy of scientific censorship it appears foolish to publish such thoughts. Anyone malignant enough could do anything with them. Still the right to be wrong has to be maintained. We should not fear to enter a forest because there are wildcats around in the trees. We should not yield our right to well-controlled speculation. It is certain questions entailed in such speculation which administrators of established knowledge fear… But in entering the cosmic age we should certainly insist on the right to ask new, even silly questions without being molested." - Wilhelm Reich

"Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue." - Wilhelm Reich

"With this the [genuine] leader will cause many to turn against him. He will have robbed these many of an object to hold on to, like a bean stalk would feel robbed of comfort if you took away the supporting stick of wood." - Wilhelm Reich

"The characteristic way of the prophet is that of poetry and lyric." - Walter Brueggemann

"The proper idiom of the prophet in cutting through royal numbness is language of grief." - Walter Brueggemann

"The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence." - Walter Lippmann

"Where the masses of people must cooperate in an uncertain and eruptive environment, it is usually necessary to secure unity and flexibility without real consent. The symbol does that… It enormously sharpens the intention of the group and welds that group, as nothing else in a crisis can weld it, to purposeful action." - Walter Lippmann

"Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"Managers are people who do things right; leaders are people who do the right thing." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"Silence - not dissent - is the one answer that leaders should refuse to accept." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis