Great Throughts Treasury

"In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. This is true everywhere; but, O my friends, it should be truest of all in political life. A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life. I care for the great deeds of the past chiefly as spurs to drive us onward in the present. I speak of the men of the past partly that they may be honored by our praise of them, but more that they may serve as examples for the future." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"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

"My faith is an act that I make, myself, naked before God. Just as there is no such thing as Christianity (or Islam or Buddhism) . . . behind which the Christian (the Muslim, the Buddhist) may shelter, which he may set between himself and the terror and splendor and living concern of God, so there is no generic Christian faith, no ‘Buddhist faith’, no ‘Hindu faith’, no ‘Jewish faith’. There is only my faith and yours, and that of my Shinto friend, or my particular Jewish neighbor." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith

"If we don't get sustainability in agriculture first, sustainability will not happen." - Wes Jackson

"Clear, unscaleable ahead, rise the mountains of instead from whose cold, cascading streams none may drink except in dreams" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Muslim women do not regard Islam as an obstacle to their progress; indeed, many may see it as a crucial component of that progress." - Dalia Mogahed

"Grief is the price we pay for love." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"When people become fused-when two become one-connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex." - Esther Perel

"The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life is as real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must be anointed so that we may see it." - Felix Adler

"Penny and penny laid up will be many." - Italian Proverbs