Great Throughts Treasury

"ManÂ… need not stand alone. Prayer will open doors; prayer will remove barriers; prayer will ease pressures; prayer will give inner peace and comfort during times of strain and stress and difficulty." - Ezra Taft Benson

"My young sisters, we have such hope for you. We have such great expectations for you. Don't settle for less than what the Lord wants you to be... Give me a young woman who loves home and family, who reads and ponders the scriptures daily, who has a burning testimony of the Book of Mormon... Give me a young woman who is virtuous and who has maintained her personal purity, who will not settle for less than a temple marriage, and I will give you a young woman who will perform miracles for the Lord now and throughout eternity." - Ezra Taft Benson

"That government is best which governs the least, so taught the courageous founders of this nation. This simple declaration is diametrically opposed to the all too common philosophy that the government should protect and support one from the cradle to the grave. The policy of the Founding Fathers has made our people and our nation strong. The opposite leads inevitably to moral decay." - Ezra Taft Benson

"What about the lame, the sick and the destitute? Is an often-voiced question. Most other countries in the world have attempted to use the power of government to meet this need. Yet, in every case, the improvement has been marginal at best and has resulted in the long run creating more misery, more poverty, and certainly less freedom than when government first stepped in. Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own… The harm dome by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional ‘do-gooder,’ who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others—with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means." - Ezra Taft Benson

"With all my heart I love our great nation. I have lived and traveled abroad just enough to make me appreciate rather fully what we have in America. To me the U. S. is not just another nation. It is not just one of a family of nations. The U. S. is a nation with a great mission to perform for the benefit and blessing of liberty-loving people everywhere." - Ezra Taft Benson

"The great work facing humanity, he says, is to move from mindlessly extracting and consuming the earth's resources to establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with nature." -

"I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus." - Faye Wattleton

"Koran says whoever believes in God in the last day shall be saved. It is a religion whose very name, Islam, comes from the word Shalom, which means peace. It's about establishing peace. We greet each other with peace be upon you, which the Jews do in greeting each other." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"My life has been devoted to peacemaking." - Feisal Abdul Rauf

"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

"The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties?. but there are no certainties." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"No one ever kicks a dead dog." - Italian Proverbs

"Sometimes the lees are better than the wine." - Italian Proverbs

"Speak of the Devil and he appears." - Italian Proverbs

"Summer is the mother of the poor." - Italian Proverbs

"The father a saint the son a devil." - Italian Proverbs

"The right man comes at the right time." - Italian Proverbs

"The well-fed man does not believe in hunger." - Italian Proverbs

"Too many chiefs, not enough warriors." - Italian Proverbs

"Two women and a goose make a market." - Italian Proverbs

"War makes robbers, and peace hangs them." - Italian Proverbs

"Who by himself can do anything, do not wait for others to do." - Italian Proverbs

"Who troubles others has no rest himself." - Italian Proverbs

"As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief, that can rise to delight, that, thank Heaven, nobody is reporting in this fashion on us." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"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 suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And you, Ringbearer' she said, turning to Frodo. 'I come to you last who are not last in my thoughts. For you I have prepared this.' She held up a small crystal phial: it glittered as she moved it and rays of white light sprang from her hand. 'In this phial,' she said,' is caught the light of Earendil's star, set amid the waters of my fountain. It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out. Frodo took the phial, and for a moment as it shone between them, he saw her again standing like a queen, great and beautiful." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien