Great Throughts Treasury

"The most we can get out of life is its discipline for ourselves, and its usefulness for others." - Tryon Edwards

"Few persons will leave their families, connections, friends, and native land, to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are going." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The immediate cause of the increase of population is the excess of the births above deaths; and the rate of increase, or the period of doubling, depends upon the proportion which the excess of the births above the deaths bears to the population." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"Only peace between equals can last." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation." - Thucydides NULL

"Their swaying bodies reflected the agitation of their minds, and they suffered the worst agony of all, ever just within the reach of safety or just on the point of destruction." - Thucydides NULL

"The institution of marriage keeps the moral world in being, and secures it from an untimely dissolution. Without it, natural affection and amiableness would not exist, domestic education would become extinct, industry and economy be unknown, and man would be left to the precarious existence of the savage. But for this institution, learning and refinement would expire, government sink into the gulf of anarchy; and religion, hunted from earth, would hasten back to her native heavens." - Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV

"He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil." - William Godwin

"I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be more or less the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious and misery so unsupportable. So far as related to myself I resolved, and this resolution has never been entirely forgotten by me, to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer." - William Godwin

"Let falsehood be a stranger to thy lips; shame on the policy that first began to tamper with the heart to hide its thoughts! And doubly shame on that inglorious tongue, that sold its honesty and told a lie." - William Havard

"I now perceive one immense omission in my psychology -- the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated." - William James

"If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door." - William James

"Fortune and humor govern the world." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"In the adversity of our best friends we often find something which does not displease us." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"There is no mockery like the mockery of that spirit which looks around in the world and believes that all is emptiness." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"The highest, the only reality, is ever at hand, but for the most part invisible. Genius makes it visible... All knowing that goes beyond the immediate experience of the moment is a matter of faith." - Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann

"Our worth is determined by the good deeds we do, rather than by the fine emotions we feel." - Elias L. Magoon

"We all know of course that we cannot abolish all the evils in this world by statute or by the enforcement of statutes, nor can we prevent the inexorable law of nature which decrees that suffering shall follow vice, and all the evil passions and folly of mankind. Law cannot give to depravity the rewards of virtue, to indolence the rewards of industry, to indifference the rewards of ambition, or to ignorance the rewards of learning. The utmost that government can do is measurably to protect men, not against the wrong they do themselves but against wrong done by others and to promote the long, slow process of educating mind and character to a better knowledge and nobler standards of life and conduct. We know all this, but when we see how much misery there is in the world and instinctively cry out against it, and when we see some things that government may do to mitigate it, we are apt to forget how little after all it is possible for any government to do, and to hold the particular government of the time and place to a standard of responsibility which no government can possibly meet." - Elihu Root

"If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings." - Albert Einstein

"Should the poor be flattered? No; let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, and crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning." - William Shakespeare

"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"But you said so yourself, the poor lass will die of it...Do you really want her to die?" - Emile Zola

"For that mist may break when the sun is high and this soul forget its sorrow and the rose ray of the closing day may promise a brighter ‘morrow." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will maker her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life-giving; a creator of free men and women." - Emma Goldman

"The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood — these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society — the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction." - Emma Goldman

"The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"At the same time, it has to recognize in the shades of difference in form the degree of blood-relationship, and make an effort to construct the ancestral tree of the animal world. In this way, comparative anatomy enters into the closest relations with comparative embryology on the one hand, and with the science of classification on the other." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

"Before we can talk about giving aid, we must have something to give. We do not have thousands of poverty-stricken villages in our country; so what do we know about effective methods of self-help in such circumstances?" - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The calves do not fear the horns of their mother." - Ethiopian Proverbs

"In vain would outward objects solicit the senses, the mind would never have any knowledge of them, if it did not perceive them. Hence the first and smallest degree of knowledge is perception." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"What we have been saying in regard to imagination and memory, must be applied to contemplation, according as it is referred to either. If it be made to consist in retaining the perceptions; before the use of instituted signs it has only a habit which does not depend on us: but it has none at all, if it be made to consist in preserving the signs themselves." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run." - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

"Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves." - Eustace Budgell

"The Founding Fathers understood the principle that “righteousness exalteth a nation”, and helped to bring about one of the greatest systems ever used to govern men. But unless we continue to seek righteousness and preserve the liberties entrusted to us, we shall lose the blessings of heaven. Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” The price of freedom is also to live in accordance with the commandments of God. The early Founding Fathers thanked the Lord for His intervention in their behalf. They saw His hand in their victories in battle and believed strongly that He watched over them." - Ezra Taft Benson

"Statesmen and Philanthropists are busy suggesting remedies for the cure of these great evils. But the renovation of our Civil Service, the reform of our Primaries, and whatever other measures may be devised, they all depend in the last instance upon the fidelity of those to whom their execution must be entrusted. They will all fail unless the root of the evil be attacked, unless the conscience of men be aroused, the confusion of right and wrong checked, and the loftier purposes of our being again brought powerfully home to the hearts of the people." - Felix Adler

"Theories of what is true have their day. They come and go, leave their deposit in the common stock of knowledge, and are supplanted by other more convincing theories. The thinkers and investigators of the world are pledged to no special theory, but feel themselves free to search for the greater truth beyond the utmost limits of present knowledge. So likewise in the field of moral truth, it is our hope, that men in proportion as they grow more enlightened, will learn to hold their theories and their creeds more loosely, and will none the less, nay, rather all the more be devoted to the supreme end of practical righteousness to which all theories and creeds must be kept subservient. There are two purposes then which we have in view: To secure in the moral and religious life perfect intellectual liberty, and at the same time to secure concert in action. There shall be no shackles upon the mind, no fetters imposed in early youth which the growing man or woman may feel prevented from shaking off, no barrier set up which daring thought may not transcend. And on the other hand there shall be unity of effort, the unity that comes of an end supremely prized and loved, the unity of earnest, morally aspiring persons, engaged in the conflict with moral evil." - Felix Adler

"The first blow is as good as two." - Italian Proverbs