Great Throughts Treasury

"The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow at any cost. To delay action is the same as death." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The most important thing is to know how to awaken in the still undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious questions and an intelligent criticism of religions." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The practical activity of man had to lead his consciousness to the reptetition of various logical figures thousands of millions of times in order that these figures could obtain the significance of axioms." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The so-called Great Powers have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole number of small and weak nations. And the imperialist war is a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"When the speeches of Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, the worst of the predators, the wild beasts of imperialism, are repeated here by Martov in the name of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party … then I say to myself that we have to be on the alert and to realise that the Cheka is indispensable!" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"A people that sells its own children is more condemnable than the buyer; this commerce demonstrates our superiority; he who gives himself a master was born to have one." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

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

"In my life, I have prayed but one prayer: oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The best is the enemy of the good. [alternatively: The perfect is the enemy of the good. Or The better is the enemy of the good.]" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

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

"This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"I’ve never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"A thousand people cannot convince one by words to the extent that one person can convince a thousand by action." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

"The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"Full freedom of speech and expression prevails in our country, and freedom of assembly and association is guaranteed." - Václav Havel

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

"That the threat is now intense is not a reason to abandon our quest for knowledge. It is a reason to hold it more tightly, in spite of the need for action to preserve our freedom, in spite of the distractions of living in turmoil, that it may not be lost or brushed aside by the demands of the hour. We would not neglect our duty to our country and our fellows to strive mightily to preserve our ways and our lives. There is an added duty, not inconsistent, not less. It is the duty to so live that there may be a reason for living, beyond the mere mechanisms of life. It is the duty to carry on, under stress, the search for understanding." - Vannevar Bush

"Communism was a great system for making people equally poor - in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"I think [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. I think that, looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about... We needed to go over there basically, and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble… And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: which part of this sentence do you understand?" - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"In the hyperconnected world, there is only good better and best," - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"The most enduring skill you can bring to the workplace is also one of the most important skills you always had to bring to reporting -- and that is the ability to learn how to learn." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"What the flattening of the world means is that we are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"A book that furnishes no quotations is no book — it is a plaything." - Thomas Love Peacock

"Test each sect by its best or its worst, as you will,--by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"A man is the part he plays among his fellows. He is not isolated; he cannot be. His life is made up of the relations he bears to others - is made or marred by those relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed in them. There is nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit - nothing else that we can see. It is by these he gets his spiritual growth; it is by these we see his character revealed, his purpose, his gifts. A few (men) act as those who have mastered the secrets of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to the great end and motive of the play. These have "found themselves," and have all the ease of a perfect adjustment." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Do you never stop to reflect just what it is that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing peoples, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this Western World with all the fine impulses which have built up human liberty on both sides of the water." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, 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

"No man ever saw the people of whom he forms a part. No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States. Its personnel extends through all the nations, and across the seas, and into every corner of the world in the persons of the representatives of the United States in foreign" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The basis of neutrality is sympathy for mankind." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The chief instrumentality by which the law of the Constitution has been extended to cover the facts of national development has of course been judicial interpretation, – the decisions of the courts. The process of formal amendment of the Constitution was made so difficult by provisions of the Constitution itself that it has seldom been feasible to use it; and the difficulty of formal amendment has undoubtedly made the courts more liberal, not to say lax, in their interpretation than they would otherwise have been. The whole business of adaptation has been theirs, and they have undertaken it with open minds, sometimes even with boldness and a touch of audacity..." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes, than the nation's life itself." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"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

"Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on." - Thucydides NULL

"Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights." - Thurgood Marshall

"The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis." - Thurgood Marshall

"What must be the knowledge of Him, from whom all created minds have derived both their power of knowledge, and the innumerable objects of their knowledge! What must be the wisdom of Him, from whom all things derive their wisdom!" - Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV

"The hunger strike at UCLA led to hundreds of students actually studying the farm worker experience and Chicanos in the context of Latin America, whereas they would have been on the outside raising fists and banners. So I count that as activism inside the classroom." - Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden

"As unrefined and basic as an animal's emotional equipment may be, it is not insensitive to freedom. Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins