Great Throughts Treasury

"Our loyalty is due entirely to the United States. It is due to the President only and exactly to the degree in which he efficiently serves the United States. It is our duty to support him when he serves the United States well. It is our duty to oppose him when he serves it badly. This is true about Mr. Wilson now and it has been true about all our Presidents in the past. It is our duty at all times to tell the truth about the President and about every one else, save in the cases where to tell the truth at the moment would benefit the public enemy." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Power invariably means both responsibility and danger." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The first essential of civilization is law. Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny and despotism. Law and order enforced with justice and by strength lie at the foundations of civilization. Law must be based upon justice, else it cannot stand, and it must be enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness in enforcing it means in the end that there is no justice and no law, nothing but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous strength. Without the habit of orderly obedience to the law, without the stern enforcement of the laws at the expense of those who defiantly resist them, there can be no possible progress, moral or material, in civilization. There can be no weakening of the law-abiding spirit here at home, if we are permanently to succeed; and just as little can we afford to show weakness abroad." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"You can practice deep listening in order to relieve the suffering in us, and in the other person. That kind of listening is described as compassionate listening. You listen only for the purpose of relieving suffering in the other person." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers, where they have been honestly, truly, and zealously cultivated." - Thomas Arnold

"Our first impressions are to consider the Ascension of our Lord as the very greatest event connected with His appearance on earth. To our own mind, undoubtedly, nothing could be so solemn, so exalting, as the changing this life for another; the putting off mortality and putting on immortality; and all this we connect with the thought of the removal from earth to heaven." - Thomas Arnold

"The great work facing humanity, he says, is to move from mindlessly extracting and consuming the earth's resources to establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with nature." - Thomas Berry

"The universe itself is the primary sacred community. All human religion should be considered as participation in the religious aspect of the universe itself. It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself." - Thomas Berry

"The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything." - Thomas Berry

"There is no inner world without the outer world." - Thomas Berry

"Wave on wave of life expansion took place for 65 million years. What we are doing when we extinguish the species of trees, extinguish the animals, extinguish the rainforest, we are negating 65 million years of effort. It's not that we are changing human history, we are changing Earth history; we're not just changing human life, we are bringing about a disastrous change in the total life development of the planet Earth." - Thomas Berry

"We need merely understand that the evolutionary process is neither random nor determined but creative. It follows the general pattern of all creativity. While there is no way of fully understanding the origin moment of the universe we can appreciate the direction of evolution in its larger arc of development as moving from lesser to great complexity in structure and from lesser to greater modes of consciousness. We can also understand the governing principles of evolution in terms of its three movements toward differentiation, inner spontaneity, and comprehensive bonding." - Thomas Berry

"A fair day's wage for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man." - Thomas Carlyle

"Cant is itself properly a double-distilled lie, the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, and abominations body themselves, and from which no true thing can come." - Thomas Carlyle

"Humour has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius." - Thomas Carlyle

"Of all God's creatures, Man alone is poor." - Thomas Carlyle

"The public! The public! How many fools does it require to make the public?" - Thomas Chalmers

"Whosoever persuadeth by reasoning from principles written, maketh him to whom he speaketh judge, both of the meaning of those principles and also of the force of his inferences upon them." - Thomas Hobbes

"Do not be too severe upon the errors of the people, but reclaim them by enlightening them." - Thomas Jefferson

"For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security." - Thomas Jefferson

"Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and... he [can] be restrained from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice, and held to their duties by dependence on his own will." - Thomas Jefferson

"Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man." - Thomas Jefferson

"Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights." - Thomas Jefferson

"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, by restraining it to true facts and sound principles only. Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." - Thomas Jefferson

"A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill-usage." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each it’s true and due fulfillment." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"The administration's highest priority over the next seven months is to ward off what now looks like a Democratic victory in the November elections. It's hard to believe his stock has fallen that low with the president. Karl got him re-elected, and Karl was not a champion of war in Iraq." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Bodily agitation, then, is an enemy to the spirit. And by agitation I do not necessarily mean exercise or movement. There is all the difference in the world between agitation and work. Work occupies the body and the mind and is necessary for the health of the spirit. Work can help us to pray and be recollected if we work properly. Agitation, however, destroys the spiritual usefulness of work and even tends to frustrate its physical and social purpose. Agitation is the useless and ill-directed action of the body. It expresses the inner confusion of a soul without peace. Work brings peace to the soul that has a semblance of order and spiritual understanding. It helps the soul to focus upon its spiritual aims and to achieve them. But the whole reason for agitation is to hide the soul from itself, to camouflage its interior conflicts and their purposelessness, and to induce a false feeling that 'we are getting somewhere'." - Thomas Merton

"If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love." - Thomas Merton

"Inexorably life moves on toward crisis and mystery." - Thomas Merton

"One cannot know God as long as one seeks to solve 'the problem of God.'" - Thomas Merton

"The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another’s imagined greatness." - Thomas Merton

"To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell." - Thomas Merton

"Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed… As I have said, doubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dominant scientific consensus, but that consensus faces problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through accidental mutation and natural selection and with respect to the formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such evolution. The more we learn about the intricacy of the genetic code and its control of these chemical processes of life, the harder these problems seem." - Thomas Nagel

"Some people believe in an afterlife. I do not; what I say will be based on the assumption that death is nothing, and final. I believe there is little to be said for it: it is a great curse, and if we truly face it nothing can make it palatable except the knowledge that by dying we can prevent an even grater evil. Otherwise, given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes I would always choose to live for another week; and by a version of mathematical induction I conclude that I would be glad to live forever." - Thomas Nagel

"Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry." - Thomas Paine

"If men will permit themselves to think, as rational beings ought to think, nothing can appear more ridiculous and absurd, exclusive of all moral reflections, than to be at the expense of building navies, filling them with men, and then hauling them into the ocean, to try which can sink each other fastester. Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with infinitely more advantage than any victory with all its expense. But this, though it best answers the purpose of Nations, does not that of Court Governments, whose habited policy is pretense for taxation, places, and offices." - Thomas Paine

"The Theophilanthropists do not call themselves the disciples of such or such a man. They avail themselves of the wise precepts that have been transmitted by writers of all countries and in all ages." - Thomas Paine

"The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy." - Thomas Paine

"Every man is conscious of a power to determine in things which he conceives to depend upon his determination. To this power we give the name of will." - Thomas Reid

"People cannot learn by having information pressed into their brains. Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed in. First, one must create a state of mind that craves knowledge, interest and wonder. You can only teach by creating an urge to learn. " - Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

"No actual skeptic, so far as I know, has claimed to disbelieve in an objective world. Skepticism is not a denial of belief, but rather a denial of rational grounds for belief. " - William P. Montague, fully William Pepperell Montague

"No civilization can live without ideals, or to put it another way, without a firm faith in moral ideas." - W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace

"Know then, as women owe a duty--so do men. Men must be like the branch and bark to trees, which doth defend them from tempestuous rage;-- clothe them in winter, tender them in age, or as ewes' love unto their eanlings lives; such should be husbands' custom to their wives. If it appears to them they've stray'd amiss, they only must rebuke them with a kiss; or cluck them as hens' chickens, with kind call, cover them under their wing, and pardon all." - John Wilkins

"For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine

"To mention Boston we use 'Boston' or a synonym, and to mention 'Boston' we use ' 'Boston' ' or a synonym. ' 'Boston' ' contains six letters and just one pair of quotation marks; 'Boston' contains six letters and no quotation marks; and Boston contains some 800,000 people." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine