Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Mankind

"Thus the Atlanteans could control what one calls the life force. As today one extracts the energy of heat from coal and transforms it into motive power for our means of locomotion, the Atlanteans knew how to put the germinal energy of organisms into the service of their technology. One can form an idea of this from the following. Think of a kernel of seed-grain. In this an energy lies dormant. This energy causes the stalk to sprout from the kernel. Nature can awaken this energy which reposes in the seed. Modern man cannot do it at will. He must bury the seed in the ground and leave the awakening to the forces of nature. The Atlantean could do something else. He knew how one can change the energy of a pile of grain into technical power, just as modern man can change the heat energy of a pile of coal into such power. Plants were cultivated in the Atlantean period not merely for use as foodstuffs but also in order to make the energies dormant in them available to commerce and industry. Just as we have mechanisms for transforming the energy dormant in coal into energy of motion in our locomotives, so the Atlanteans had mechanisms in which they — so to speak — burned plant seeds, and in which the life force was transformed into technically utilizable power. The vehicles of the Atlanteans, which floated a short distance above the ground travelled at a height lower than that of the mountain ranges of the Atlantean period, and they had steering mechanisms by the aid of which they could rise above these mountain ranges." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

"But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God's Word. The Anti-Christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell." - Russell Kirk

"Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations." - Russell Kirk

"You will not see anyone who is really striving after his advancement who is not given to spiritual reading. And as to him who neglects it, the fact will soon be observed by his progress." - Saint Athanasius, aka Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Athanasius the Great, St. Athanasius I of Alexandria, St. Athanasius the Confessor, St. Athanasius the Apostolic NULL

"Murder and theft have been committed since the earliest history of mankind, but that fact has not made murder meritorious or larceny legal." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.

"However important it is that love shall precede marriage, it is far more important that it shall continue after marriage." - Samson Raphael Hirsch

"The goal of study has not been practical life, to understand the world and our duty in it." - Samson Raphael Hirsch

"Did the protection we received annul our rights as men, and lay us under an obligation of being miserable? Who among you, my countrymen, that is a father, would claim authority to make your child a slave because you had nourished him in infancy?" - Samuel Adams

"Let Divines, and Philosophers, Statesmen and Patriots unite their endeavours to renovate the Age, by impressing the Minds of Men with the importance of educating their little boys, and girls - of inculcating in the Minds of youth the fear, and Love of the Deity, and universal Phylanthropy; and in subordination to these great principles, the Love of their Country - of instructing them in the Art of self government, without which they never can act a wise part in the Government of Societys great, or small - in short of leading them in the Study, and Practice of the exalted Virtues." - Samuel Adams

"Our forefathers threw off the yoke of Popery in religion; for you is reserved the honor of leveling the popery of politics. They opened the Bible to all, and maintained the capacity of every man to judge for himself in religion." - Samuel Adams

"We have this day restored the Sovereign to whom all alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in Heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds his subjects assuming that freedom of thought, and dignity of self-direction which He bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting sun, may His kingdom come." - Samuel Adams

"Virtue and true goodness, righteousness and equity, are things truly noble and excellent, lovely and venerable in themselves." - Samuel Clarke

"Of course the children of immigrants go to school, and after a few years they become Americanized. But how about the grown-up persons, the adults? Who makes an effort to Americanize them? The labor organization. . . . We have done more to help establish somewhat of a conception of Americanism amongst the emigrants to our country than any other agency of which I know." - Samuel Gompers

"As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, though without any desire fixed of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"He that resigns his peace to little casualties, and suffers the course of his life to be interrupted for fortuitous inadvertencies or offences, delivers up himself to the direction of the wind, and loses all the constancy and equanimity which constitutes the chief praise of a wise man." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"I fly from pleasure, because pleasure has ceased to please: I am lonely because I am miserable." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy without physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Let them call it mischief; Then it is past and prosper'd, 'twill be virtue." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Study hard. Be evil." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"The immateriality of mind, and... the unconsciousness of matter." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"The purpose of an injury is to vex and trouble me. - Now, nothing can do that to him that is truly valiant." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Truth, Sir, is a cow, which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress." - Sydney J. Harris

"In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?" - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Religion... comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science." - Stephen Hawking

"I'm not religious in the normal sense. I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws." - Stephen Hawking

"Justice is the constitution or fundamental law of the moral universe, the law of right, a rule of conduct for man in all his moral relations. Accordingly all human affairs must be subject to that as the law paramount; what is right agrees therewith and stands, what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohesions of self-love, of friendship, or of patriotism, must all be subordinate to this universal gravitation towards the eternal right." - Theodore Parker

"Let your pleasures be taken as Daniel took his prayer, with his windows open-pleasures which need not cause a single blush on an ingenuous cheek." - Theodore Parker

"We need not renounce the use of conventional force. We will be ready to repel any clear and present danger that poses a genuine threat to our national security and survival." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen

"In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The wild life of today is not ours to do with as we please. The original stock was given to us in trust for the benefit both of the present and the future. We must render an accounting of this trust to those who come after us." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Anger kills both laughter and joy; what greater foe is there than anger?" - Thiruvalluvar NULL

"All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven." - Thomas Carlyle

"Genius . . . means the transcendent capacity of taking trouble." - Thomas Carlyle

"She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play." - Thomas Hardy

"By this we may understand, there be two sorts of knowledge, whereof the one is nothing else but sense, or knowledge original (as I have said at the beginning of the second chapter), and remembrance of the same; the other is called science or knowledge of the truth of propositions, and how things are called, and is derived from understanding." - Thomas Hobbes

"Ignorance of the law is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the laws to which he is subject." - Thomas Hobbes

"In the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition: secondly, diffidence: thirdly, glory. The first, maketh men invade for gain: the second, for safety: and the third, for reputation." - Thomas Hobbes

"The imagination that is raised in man, or any other creature imbued with the faculty of imagining, by words or other voluntary signs, is that we generally call ‘understanding,’ and is common to man and beast. For a dog by custom will understand the call or the rating of his master; and so will many other beasts. That understanding which is peculiar to man is the understanding not only his will but his conceptions and thoughts, by the sequel and contexture of the names of things into affirmations, negations, and other forms of speech; and of this kind of understanding I shall speak hereafter." - Thomas Hobbes

"All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. [Jefferson’s last letter]" -

"All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights." -

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State." -

"It is while we are young that the habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterward." -