Great Throughts Treasury

"Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?" - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin--the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"All over Europe the organs that represent dogmatic interests are in permanent opposition to the progressive tendencies around them, and are rapidly sinking into contempt. In every country in which a strong political life is manifested, the secularization of politics is the consequence. Each stage of that movement has been initiated and effected by those who are most indifferent to dogmatic theology, and each has been opposed by those who are most occupied with theology." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"Nothing, indeed, could be more unlike the tone of the [Patristic] Fathers, than the cold, passionless, and prudential theology of the eighteenth century; a theology which regarded Christianity as an admirable auxiliary to the police force, and a principle of decorum and of cohesion in society, but which carefully banished from it all enthusiasm, veiled or attenuated all its mysteries, and virtually reduced it to an authoritative system of moral philosophy." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"The religion of one age is often the poetry of the next. Around every living and operative faith there lies a region of allegory and of imagination into which opinions frequently pass, and in which they long retain a transfigured and idealised existence after their natural life has died away. They are, as it were, deflected. They no longer tell directly and forcibly upon human actions. They no longer produce terror, inspire hopes, awake passions, or mould the characters of men; yet they still exercise a kind of reflex influence, and form part of the ornamental culture of the age. They are turned into allegories. They are interpreted in a non-natural sense. They are invested with a fanciful, poetic, but most attractive garb. They follow instead of controlling the current of thought, and being transformed by far-fetched and ingenious explanations, they become the embellishments of systems of belief that are wholly irreconcilable with their original tendencies. The gods of heathenism were thus translated from the sphere of religion to the sphere of poetry. The grotesque legends and the harsh doctrines of a superstitious faith are so explained away, that they appear graceful myths foreshadowing and illustrating the conceptions of a brighter day. For a time they flicker upon the horizon with a softly beautiful light that enchants the poet, and lends a charm to the new system with which they are made to blend; but at last this too fades away. Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays, possessing little heat, are expended in creating beauty." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal." - W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade

"Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital." - Walker Percy

"I think dress, hairstyle and make-up are the crucial factors in projecting an attractive persona and give one the chance to enhance one's best physical features." - Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire

"All efforts and all attention should now be concentrated on the next step — the search after forms of the transition or the approach to the proletarian revolution." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and equality. But, in fact, it screens the non-freedom and inferiority of women, the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Down with all colonial policy, down with the whole policy of intervention and capitalist struggle for the conquest of foreign lands and foreign populations, for new privileges, new markets, control of the Straits, etc.!" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"In the two months following the revolution the industrialists have robbed the whole of Russia." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Nothing will raise the revolutionary energy of the world proletariat so much, nothing will shorten the path leading to its complete victory to such an extent, as this decisive victory of the revolution that has now started in Russia." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"One cannot live in society and be free from society." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defensism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side.As long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blancists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"To reject compromises “on principle,” to reject the permissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what kind, is childishness. A political leader who desires to be useful to the revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete cases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of opportunism and treachery." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side. One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. … Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i.e., the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites, to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness. Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades.… The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"All I presume is that there are millions of men on earth a hundred times more to be pitied than King Charles Edward, the Emperor Ivan, and the Sultan Achmet." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"There is much unexplored potential in each human being. We are not just flesh and bone or an amalgamation of conditionings. If this were so, our future on this planet would not be very bright. But there is infinitely more to life, and each passionate being who dares to explore beyond the fragmentary and superficial into the mystery of totality helps all humanity perceive what it is to be fully human. Revolution, total revolution, implies experimenting with the impossible. And when an individual takes a step in the direction of the new, the impossible, the whole human race travels through that individual." - Vimala Thakar

"Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"There's just this… an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"How small man is on this little atom where he dies! But how great his intelligence! He knows when the face of the stars must be masked in darkness, when the comets will return after thousands of years, he who lasts only an instant! A microscopic insect lost in a fold of the heavenly robe, the orbs cannot hide from him a single one of their movements in the depth of space. What destinies will those stars, new to us, light? Is their revelation bound up with some new phase of humanity? You will know, race to be born; I know not, and I am departing." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

"The heart is like the tree that given balm for the wounds of man only when the iron has pierced it." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

"Destiny never opens one door without shutting another." - Victor Hugo

"That which separates man from the brute is the notion of good and evil.... Hence that great and twofold sentiment in man of his liberty and his responsibility. He can be good or he can be wicked. That is an account he will have to settle. He can be guilty; and that — it is a striking fact, and one upon which I insist — is his greatness." - Victor Hugo

"The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both." - Victor Hugo

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm." - Victor Hugo

"The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them." - Victor Hugo

"What a battlefied man is!" - Victor Hugo

"Which do you admire, the slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are for the slayer. Hurrah for Brutus! He slew. That's virtue. Virtue, but folly too...The Brutus who slew Caesar was in love with a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also designed that statue of an Amazon called the beautiful limbed, Euknemos, which Nero carried with him on his journeys. This Strongylion left nothing but two statues which put Brutus and Nero in harmony. Brutus was in love with one and Nero with the other." - Victor Hugo

"Wisdom is a sacred communion." - Victor Hugo

"Poles are able to reflect their history, they respect it. Who knows if anybody will remember when we commemorate our 25 years [since the 1989 Velvet Revolution]." - Václav Havel

"Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt." - Václav Havel

"The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul." - Václav Havel

"This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard." - Václav Havel

"On the sixth interior are painted all the mechanical arts, with the several instruments for each and their manner of use among different nations. Alongside, the dignity of such is placed, and their several inventors are named. But on the exterior all the inventors in science, in warfare, and in law are represented." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

"Firmness is adherence to truth and duty is generally most decided when most intelligent and conscientious, and is sometimes mistaken for obstinacy by those who do not comprehend its nature and motive." - Tryon Edwards

"Give work rather than alms to the poor. The former drives out indolence, the latter industry." - Tryon Edwards

"It is not true that there are no enjoyments in the ways of sin; there are, many and various. - But the great and radical defect of them all is, that they are transitory and unsubstantial, at war with reason and conscience, and always leave a sting behind. We are hungry, and they offer us bread; but it is poisoned bread. We are thirsty, and they offer us drink; but it is from deadly fountains. They may and often do satisfy us for the moment; but it is death in the end. It is only the bread of heaven and the water of life that can so satisfy that we shall hunger no more and thirst no more forever." - Tryon Edwards