Great Throughts Treasury

"The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The first step towards the emancipation of the people from this penal servitude is the confiscation of the landed estates, the introduction of workers’ control and the nationalization of the banks. The next steps will be the nationalization of the factories, the compulsory organization of the whole population in consumers’ societies, which are at the same time societies for the sale of products, and the state monopoly of the trade in grain and other necessities." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it." - Vince Gill

"The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness." - Victor Hugo

"An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension and man began to lose control of it." - Václav Havel

"Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world. Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction." - Václav Havel

"Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness a more humane society will not emerge." - Václav Havel

"When you study history and look at every civilization that has grown up and died off, they all leave one remnant: a major sports coliseum at the heart of their capital. Our fate can be different; but only if we start doing things differently." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usually goes hand in hand with folly, passion with coarseness and narrowness of mind." - Thucydides NULL

"A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions." - Emil M. Cioran

"What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!" - Emma Goldman

"Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. “We have a single system," he wrote, and “in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"WeÂ’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. EverybodyÂ’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The battleground has been moderates of all faith traditions in all the countries of the world against the radicals of all faith traditions in all parts of the world." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"Summer is the mother of the poor." - Italian Proverbs