Great Throughts Treasury

"The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"I once had a dispute with a group of Swedish professors at the University of Uppsala as to which country, Sweden or Canada, was the dullest in the world. It was a draw; they claimed superiority because of their long history, and I claimed it because of Canada's immense land mass, which gives us space for tremendous expansion, even of such things as dullness." - Robertson Davies

"The logical thing to do, when the next war comes, is to recruit an army from all those of whatever age or sex who are unable to pass certain basic intelligence tests. This would be a good way of getting rid of a lot of the stupid people who cumber the earth; probably there would be a high percentage of scientists, Civil Servants, uplifters and minor prophets in an armed force collected in such a way. But if every country adopted this method the country with the biggest population of boobs, yahoos and ninnies would win, and I am not entirely sure that we have overall superiority in this respect, though we seem bound in that direction." - Robertson Davies

"The one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period [is] contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"The firmest friendship is based on an identity of likes and dislikes." - Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL

"Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God." - Samuel Butler

"Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions. What we have missed long enough to want it, we value more when it is regained; but that which has been lost till it is forgotten will be found at last with little gladness, and with still less if a substitute has supplied the place." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"It is observed in the golden verses of Pythagoras that power is never far from necessity. The vigor of the human mind quickly appears when there is no longer any place for doubt and hesitation, when diffidence is absorbed in the sense of danger, or overwhelmed by some resistless passion." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"It is certain that nothing we have brings us happiness, but only what we are, what we feel about ourselves." - Sydney J. Harris

"It is vain to apportion praise and blame. The truth is that if the vicious circle is so hard to break, it is because the two sexes are each the victim at once of the other and of itself. Between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure liberty, an agreement could be easily reached: the more so as the war profits neither. But the complexity of the whole affair derives from the fact that each camp is giving aid and comfort to the enemy; woman is pursuing a dream of submission, man a dream of identification. Want of authenticity does not pay: each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the temptations of the easy way; what man and woman loathe in each other is the shattering frustration of each one's own bad faith and baseness." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Many similarities of basic design among animal phyla, once so confidently attributed to convergence, and viewed as testimony to the power of natural selection to craft exquisite adaptation, demand the opposite interpretation that Mayr labeled as inconceivable: the similar features arehomologies, or products of the same genes, inherited from a common ancestor and never altered enough by subsequent evolution to erase their comparable structure and function. The similarities record the constraining power of conserved history, not the architectural skills of natural selection independently pursuing an optimal design in separate lineages. Vertebrates are, in a certain sense, true brothers (or homologs) - not mere analogs - of worms and insects." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Nothing that has ever been thought and said with a clear mind and pure ethical strength is totally in vain; even if it comes from a weak hand and is imperfectly formed, it inspires the ethical spirit to constantly renewed creation." - Stefan Zweig

"The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes." - Thomas Jefferson

"There is a time when to avoid trouble is to store up trouble, and when to seek for a lazy and a cowardly peace is to court a still greater danger." - William Barclay

"Even a friend cannot rescue one from old age. – Kenyan Proverb" -

"Out of every fruition of success, no matter what, comes forth something to make a new effort necessary." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"We are suffering throughout the world in the darkness of the misery we have created. By believing in the fragmentary and the superficial, we have failed to live together in peace and harmony, and so darkness looms very large on the horizon. It’s in such darkness that common people such as you and I feel the urgency to go deeper, to abandon superficial approaches that are inadequate and to activate the creative forces available to each of us as expressions of wholeness. The vast intelligence that orders the cosmos is available to all. The beauty of life, the wonder of living, is that we share creativity, intelligence, and unlimited potential with the rest of the cosmos. If the universe is vast and mysterious, we are vast and mysterious. If it contains innumerable creative energies, we contain innumerable creative energies. If it has healing energies, we also have healing energies. To realize that we are not simply physical beings on a material planet, but that we are whole beings, each a miniature cosmos, each related to all of life in intimate, profound ways, should radically transform how we perceive ourselves, our environments, our social problems. Nothing can ever be isolated from wholeness." - Vimala Thakar

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Even now we should engage ourselves in such actions that lead to national development, growth and progress." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"The plants whose father was the sky, whose mother the earth, Whose root the (heavenly) ocean--may those divine herbs aid thee in obtaining a son." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Deviation from either truth or duty is a downward path, and none can say where the descent will end. - "He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and little."" - Tryon Edwards

"Much of the glory and sublimity of truth is connected with its mystery. - To understand everything we must be as God." - Tryon Edwards

"But self-renunciation means God-possession, the being possessed by God. Out of utter humility and self-forgetfulness comes the thunder of the prophets, "Thus saith the Lord." High station and low are leveled before Him. Be not fooled by the world's power. Imposing institutions of war and imperialism and greed are wholly vulnerable for they, and we, are forever in the hands of a conquering God. These are not cheap and hasty words. The high and noble adventures of faith can in our truest moments be seen as no adventures at all, but certainties. And if we live in complete humility in God we can smile in patient assurance as we work. Will you be wise enough and humble enough to be little fools of God? For who can finally stay His power? Who can resist His persuading love? Truly says Saint Augustine, "There is something in humility which raiseth the heart upward."" - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"The walking stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

"It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disasters to discuss the matter." - Thucydides NULL

"But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck." - William James

"The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance." - Hu Shih, or Hú Shì

"Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment." - Emma Goldman

"Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels, said Dr. Samuel Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our time, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment in the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the honest workingman." - Emma Goldman

"For myself, I want no advantage over my fellow man, and if he is weaker than I, all the more is it my duty to help him." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"The cyclone ends. The sun returns; the lofty coconut trees lift up their plumes again; man does likewise. The great anguish is over; joy has returned; the sea smiles like a child." -

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