Great Throughts Treasury

"The constant effort towards population, which is found even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The question is, what is saving?" - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries." - Thucydides NULL

"The ever varying brilliancy and grandeur of the landscape, and the magnificence of the sky, sun, moon and stars, enter more extensively into the enjoyment of mankind than we, perhaps ever think, or can possibly apprehend, without frequent and extensive investigation. This beauty and splendor of the objects around us, it is ever to be remembered, is not necessary to their existence, nor to what we commonly intend by their usefulness. It is therefore to be regarded as a source of pleasure, gratuitously super-induced upon the general nature of the objects themselves, and in this light, a testimony of the divine goodness, peculiarly affecting." - Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV

"At Christmas I no more desire a rose Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled mirth; But like of each thing that in season grows. Love's Labour 's Lost. Act i. Sc. 1." - William Shakespeare

"Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows tracings of her workings apart from the beaten paths; nor is there any better way to advance the proper practice of medicine than to give our minds to the discovery of the usual law of nature, by careful investigation of cases of rarer forms of disease." - William Harvey

"God grant indeed thy words are not for nought! Then shalt thou save me, since for many a day to such a dreadful life I have been brought: nor will I spare with all my heart to pay what man soever takes my grief away; ah! I will love thee, if thou lovest me but well enough my saviour now to be." - William Morris

"I have the utmost respect for them. It was formed at the time of great violence and danger, particularly for African-American lawyers." - William Morris

"Now such an one for daughter Creon had as maketh wise men fools and young men mad." - William Morris

"The less you trust others, the less you will be deceived." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"The illness I suffer from is serious and persistent and my life may be over any day. Whenever I think about you, I become sad and depressed. In my leisure time I have written Precepts for My Daughters in seven chapters. My daughters, each of you make yourself a copy; perhaps it will be of some use and benefit to you. Do your very best once you have left home!" - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban

"Every man has his own work. Do not let the spheres of duty be confused. When wise men are entrusted with office, the sound of praise arises. If corrupt men hold office, disasters and tumult multiply. In all things, whether great or small, find the right man and they will be well managed. Therefore the wise sovereigns of antiquity sought the man to fill the office, and not the office to suit the man. If this is done the state will be lasting and the realm will be free from danger." - Prince Shōtoku, born Shotoku Taishi, aka Prince Umayado or Prince Kamitsumiya

"One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'" - Elizabeth Lesser

"We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn." - Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

"Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate; As the voyage along thru life; 'Tis the will of the soul That decides its goal, And not the calm or the strife." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide, if cool my heart and high my head I think 'How lucky are the dead." - Dorothy Parker

"He had ceased to express his fondness for her in words, and recoiled with angry suspicion from her girlish caresses, as if conscious there could be no gratification in lavishing such marks of affection on him." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be." - Emma Goldman

"The mystery of God’s providence is a most sublime consideration. It is easy to let our reason run away with itself. It is at a loss when it attempts to search into the eternal decrees of election or the entangled mazes and labyrinths in which the divine providence walks. This knowledge is too wonderful for us. Man can be very confident that God exercises the most accurate providence over him and his affairs. Nothing comes to pass without our heavenly Father. No evil comes to pass without his permissive providence, and no good without his ordaining providence to his own ends." - Ezekial Hopkins

"Revolutionaries filling the world banging for the world to not sleep weighed on the bodies of the poor." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"In other words, everybody claims to achieve freedom by his own "system" and accuses every other "system" as inevitably entailing tyranny, totalitarianism, or anarchy leading to both." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The truth is that a large part of the costs of private enterprise has been borne by the public authorities—because they pay for the infrastructure—and that the profits of private enterprise therefore greatly overstate its achievement." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place" - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Child labor must be abolished by the working class." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Civilization has done little for labor except to modify the forms of its exploitation." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Competition was natural enough at one time, but do you think you are competing today? Many of you think you are. Against whom? Against Rockefeller? About as I would if I had a wheelbarrow and competed with the Santa Fe from here to Kansas City." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on Earth." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"The African is here and to stay. How came he to our shores? Ask your grandfathers, Mr. Anonymous, and if they will tell the truth you will or should blush for the crimes." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"The general public knows practically nothing about the prison and appears to be little concerned about how it is managed and how prisoners are treated." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"With faith and hope and courage we hold our heads erect and with dauntless spirit marshal the working class for the march from Capitalism to Socialism, from Slavery to Freedom, from Barbarism to Civilization." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"And amid all the splendors of the World, its vast halls and spaces, and its wheeling fires, Il£vatar chose a place for their habitation in the Deeps of Time and in the midst of the innumerable stars." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And Gandalf said: 'This is your realm, and the heart of the greater realm that shall be. The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order it's beginning and to preserve what must be preserved. For though much has been saved, much must now pass away; and the power of the Three Rings also is ended. And all the lands that you see, and those that lie round about them, shall be dwellings of Men. For the time comes of the Dominion of Men, and the Elder Kindred shall fade or depart." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And so it was that Gwaihir saw them with his keen far-seeing eyes, as down the wild wind he came, and daring the great peril of the skies he circled in the air: two small dark figures, forlorn, hand in hand upon a little hill, while the world shook under them, and gasped, and rivers of fire drew near. And even as he espied tham and came swooping down, he saw them fall, worn out, or choked with fumes and heat, or stricken down by despair at last, hiding their eyes from death. Side by side they lay; and down swept Gwaihir, and down came Landroval and Meneldor the swift; and in a dream, not knowing what fate had befallen them, the wanderers were lifted up and borne far away out of the darkness and the fire." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring? passed out of all knowledge." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And still Meriadoc the hobbit stood there blinking through his tears, and no one spoke to him, indeed none seemed to heed him. He brushed away the tears, and stooped to pick up the green shield that Eowyn had given him, and he slung it at his back. Then he looked for his sword that he had let fall; for even as he struck his blow his arm was numbed, and now he could only use his left hand." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Aragorn threw back his cloak. The elven-sheath glittered as he grasped it, and the bright blade of And£ril shone like a sudden flame as he swept it out. 'Elendil!' he cried. 'I am Aragorn, son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar, the Elfstone, D£nadan, the heir of Isildur Elendil's son of Gondor. Here is the Sword that was Broken and is forged again! Will you aid me or thwart me? Choose swiftly!" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"At least for a while the road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"But Arwen went forth from the House, and the light of her eyes was quenched, and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Then she said farewell to Eldarion, and to her daughters, and to all whom she had loved; and she went out from the city of Minas Tirith and passed away to the land of L¢rien, and dwelt there alone under the fading trees until winter came. Galadriel had passed away and Celeborn also was gone, and the land was silent. 'There at last when the Mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and Elanor and Niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends; as works fair and wonderful, while they still endure for eyes to see, are ever their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken for ever do they pass into song." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien