Great Throughts Treasury

"Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass." - Emma Goldman

"How like us is that ugly brute, the ape!" - Ennius, fully Quintus Ennius NULL

"The lightning-bug is brilliant, but he hasn't any mind He stumbles through existence with his head-light on behind." - Eugene Ware, aka "Ironquill", fully Captain Eugene Fitch Ware

"A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled." - Eudora Welty

"I believe so. In its beginning, dialogue’s the easiest thing in the world to write when you have a good ear, which I think I have. But as it goes on, it’s the most difficult, because it has so many ways to function. Sometimes I needed to make a speech do three or four or five things at once—reveal what the character said but also what he thought he said, what he hid, what others were going to think he meant, and what they misunderstood, and so forth—all in his single speech. And the speech would have to keep the essence of this one character, his whole particular outlook in concentrated form. This isn’t to say I succeeded. But I guess it explains why dialogue gives me my greatest pleasure in writing." - Eudora Welty

"There is a city to be built, the plan of which we carry in our heads, in our hearts. Countless generations have already toiled at the building of it. The effort to aid in completing it, with us, takes the place of prayer. In this sense we say, "Laborare est orare."" - Felix Adler

"The world wags on with three things: doing, undoing, and pretending." - Italian Proverbs