Great Throughts Treasury

"It's a great game to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. ... Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn't know he's got the wrong theory of what happens. If I'm in the tribe and I'm sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn't know what he's doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they'll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"One of the ideas that I grapple with constantly is the idea that if that leadership doesn" - Richard Heinberg

"Such biological ideas as the 'survival of the fittest,' whatever their doubtful value in natural science, are utterly useless in attempting to understand society... The life of a man in society, while it is incidentally a biological fact, has characteristics that are not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of a cultural analysis... the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa ... Social improvement is a product of advances in technology and social organization, not of breeding or selective elimination... Judgments as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences; and ... there is nothing in nature or a naturalistic philosophy of life to make impossible the acceptance of moral sanctions that can be employed for the common good." - Richard Hofstadter

"The intellectual is engaged-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels." - Richard Hofstadter

"Lose not a moment's chance of contemplating beauty; each of these seconds while the day changes into night is precious; in this is life. I go out into the fields and hills, in the sunshine and the air, and I become full of certain thoughts and feelings: I return towards the houses and find every one of those aspirations and ideas jarred upon." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies

"Enter now the theory of quantum mechanics to upend our ideas about the physical nature of the world. Physicists were discovering in their laboratories that the basic properties of atomic particles were being altered just by the simple act of measuring them. Soon after it was discovered that, in certain experimental arrangements, particles at the atomic level do not fully exist prior to being observed. The activity of conscious observation and measurement was actually bringing particles into full existence! This suggests that reality may not be pre-given and "objective," but rather that it is being..." - Richard Tarnas, fully Richard Theodore Tarnas

"I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me." - Robertson Davies

"One reason people get divorced is that they run out of gift ideas for each other." - Robert Byrne, fully Robert Leo Byrne

"All riches have their origin in mind. Wealth is in ideas -- not money." - Robert Collier

"You must intensify and render continuous by repeatedly presenting with suggestive ideas and mental pictures of the feast of good things, and the flowing fountain, which awaits the successful achievement or attainment of the desires." - Robert Collier

"In the realm of ideas it is better to let the mind sally forth, even if some precious preconceptions suffer a mauling. " - Robert F. Goheen, fully Robert Francis Goheen

"A name is a label, and as soon as there is a label, the ideas disappear and out comes label-worship and label-bashing, and instead of living by a theme of ideas, people begin dying for labels... and the last thing the world needs is another religion." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach

"The absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision-making." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"The scarcity of leadership from people in authority, however, makes it all the more critical to the adaptive successes of a polity that leadership be exercised by people without authority." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"The times when the centre of gravity of political development and the crystallising agent of capitalist contradictions lay on the European continent, are long gone by. To-day Europe is only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions." - Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"

"The truly mysterious ‘object’ is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently `wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in wonder that strikes us chill and numb." - Rudolf Otto

"Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall and falling, they’re given wings." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"If a man has a *right* to marry, some woman must have the duty of marrying him; if a man has a *right* to rest, some other person must have the duty of supporting him. If rights are confused thus with desires, the mass of men must feel always that some vast, intangible conspiracy thwarts their attainment of what they are told is their inalienable birthright." - Russell Kirk

"Work even when I'm satisfied with it is never my child I love nor my servant I've brought to heel. It's always busy work I do with my left hand, and part of me watches grudging the wastes of a lifetime." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton

"With death all will be taken from us, all earthly goods, riches, beauty of body and raiment, spacious dwellings, etc., but the virtue of the soul, that incorruptible raiment, shall remain with us eternally." - Saint John of Kronstadt, fully John Il’ich Serguiev, aka Holy Father John of the Kronstadt NULL

"These losses of the Church in the past hundred years give us reason to fear in the present misfortune that in another hundred years we may lose the Church entirely in Europe. So, keeping this fear in mind, blessed are those who cooperate in extending the Church elsewhere." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie

"An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possest with an error it is like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty. Whatsoever he lays hold on, like a drowning man, he never loses, though it do but help to sink him the sooner. His ignorance is abrupt and inaccessible, impregnable both by art and nature, and will hold out to the last, though it has nothing but rubbish to defend." - Samuel Butler

"Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?" - Samuel Butler

"Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage." - Samuel Butler

"The United States of America wants nothing whatever out of this war. You cannot give us anything that we would take. What we want is not only for us to live in peace and unafraid for our freedom, but to know that the peoples of the nationalities of the world have an opportunity in the arts of peace, working out their destinies and in the common cause vying with each other to bring about the great, the true ideal of internationalism and human brotherhood." - Samuel Gompers

"I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet." - Sam Walton, fully Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton

"There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"For the greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only loveable because they are changing." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"If you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

"The Supreme Lord is higher than Virat, beyond Hiranyagarbha. He is vast and is hidden in the bodies of all living beings. By knowing Him who alone pervades the universe, men become immortal." - Shvetashvatara Upanishad

"Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies." - Simone Weil

"Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive ." - Simone Weil

"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too." - Simone Weil

"In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered: Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of s gigantic hound!" - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention? To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. The dog did nothing in the night-time. That was the curious incident, remarked Sherlock Holmes." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"Facts do not 'speak for themselves', they are read in the light of theory" - Stephan Jay Gould

"I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research." - Stephan Jay Gould

"I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy." - Stephan Jay Gould

"My visceral perception of brotherhood harmonizes with our best modern biological knowledge. […] Many people think (or fear) that equality of human races represents a hope of liberal sentimentality probably squashed by the hard realities of history. They are wrong. This essay can be summarized in a single phrase, a motto if you will: Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not true by definition; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen." - Stephan Jay Gould

"No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning." - Stephan Jay Gould

"This theme of mutually invisible life at widely differing scales bears an important implication for the culture wars that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general […]. One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify—but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent—and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia, but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered. [...] Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, fact can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback… toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site." - Stephan Jay Gould