Great Throughts Treasury

"Among the wise and high-minded people who in self-respecting and genuine fashion strive earnestly for peace, there are the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a movement and always discrediting it — the men who form the lunatic fringe in all reform movements." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective — a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"In like manner did the King eternal, immortal, and invisible, surrounded as he is with the splendours of a wide and everlasting monarchy, turn him to our humble habitation; and the footsteps of God manifest in the flesh have been on the narrow spot of ground we occupy; and small though our mansion be amid the orbs and the systems of immensity, hither hath the King of glory bent his mysterious way, and entered the tabernacle of men, and in the disguise of a servant did he sojourn for years under the roof which canopies our obscure and solitary world." - Thomas Chalmers

"Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,.. but it is also good for the disease." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"His point [the absolutist] is that although what people think right varies in different countries and period, yet what actually is right is everywhere and always the same." - W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace

"I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"A politician is just like a pickpocket. It’s almost impossible to get one to reform." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"If I could kick the person in the tail that causes me the most problems I could not sit down for a week." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Nations are just like individuals. Loan them money and you lose their friendship." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"If a joyous elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be very much like Whitman's famous "Song of Myself." It would have just about as much delicacy and deftness and discrimination." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . ." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

"Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter? Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time." - Wendell Berry

"We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare — warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself." - Wendell Berry

"Man: Do you know anything about electricity? WC: My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at state prison." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield

"Does not the whole history of socialism, particularly of French socialism, which is so rich in revolutionary striving, show us that when the working people themselves take power in their hands the ruling classes resort to unheard-of crimes and shootings if it is a matter of protecting their money-bags." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capitalism is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The proletarian state must effect the transition to collective farming with extreme caution and only very gradually, by the force of example, without any coercion of the middle peasant." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"What color is in a picture, enthusiasm is in life." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"The Creator Himself has created the universe; He Himself shall destroy it." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for." - Václav Havel

"Religion, in its purity, is not so much a pursuit as a temper; or rather it is a temper, leading to the pursuit of all that is high and holy. Its foundation is faith; its action, works; its temper, holiness; its aim, obedience to God in improvement of self and benevolence to men." - Tryon Edwards

"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The business of government is to organize the common interest against the special interests." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"In the philosophy of mind, subjective denotes what is to be referred to the thinking subject, the ego; objective what belongs to the object of thought, the non ego. Philosophy being the essence of knowledge, and the science of knowledge supposing, in its most fundamental and thorough-going analysis, the distinction of the subject and object of knowledge, it is evident that to philosophy the subject of knowledge would be by pre-eminence the subject, and the object of knowledge the object. It was therefore natural that the object and objective, the subject and subjective, should be employed by philosophers as simple terms, compendiously to denote the grand discrimination about which philosophy was constantly employed, and which no others could be found so precisely and promptly to express." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"O here will I set of my everlasting rest and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world wearied flesh eyes look your last arms take your last embrace and lips all you the doors of breath seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death." - William Shakespeare

"Order gave each thing view." - William Shakespeare

"How could a king who should rule over all people and all things in the country with impartiality treat those of low birth any differently from the way he treats others?" - Sejong the Great, aka King Sejong, family name Yi, given name Do NULL

"Science has been arranging, classifying, methodizing, simplifying, everything except itself. It has made possible the tremendous modern development of power of organization which has so multiplied the effective power of human effort as to make the differences from the past seem to be of kind rather than of degree. It has organized itself very imperfectly. Scientific men are only recently realizing that the principles which apply to success on a large scale in transportation and manufacture and general staff work to apply them; that the difference between a mob and an army does not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon human nature; that the effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by organization just as the effective power of a great number of laborers may be increased by military discipline." - Elihu Root

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it." - Elizabeth Drew, aka Elizabeth Brenner

"It is in the nature of all passionate and uncontrolled emotion to prey upon and weaken the forces of reflective power, as much as it is in the nature of controlled emotion to strengthen them." - Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

"The present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may fell, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook. The problem children of the world – from this point of view and in spite of many other considerations that could be adduced – are the rich societies and not the poor." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Why are we put on the spot of being God’s defender. We are expected to explain God to his disappointed clients. We’re thrust into the role of a clerk at Wal-Mart’s customer service desk – the complaints department of humanity." - Eugene Peterson