Great Throughts Treasury

"I have my doubts (that the schools will open on time). We have a law case out of Sojourner-Douglass, and at Chesapeake we have all kinds of issues." - Eugene Peterson

"I haven't made that decision. But I would certainly welcome the superintendent of schools, instead of pointing the finger at everybody and everything, taking some accountability of what is happening on his watch." - Eugene Peterson

"I wish him well. Now he can continue to pursue his dream of excellence in education." - Eugene Peterson

"If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like spiritual direction? Why not just friend?" - Eugene Peterson

"If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. There must be an organic unity between past and future lived in the present." - Eugene Peterson

"If we're trying to set education policy, we have to listen to the education experts." - Eugene Peterson

"Song and dance are the result of an excess energy. When we are normal we talk, when we are dying we whisper, but when there is more in us than we contain we sing. When we are healthy we walk, when we are decrepit we shuffle, but when we are beyond ourselves with vitality we dance." - Eugene Peterson

"We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God sticks with us." - Eugene Peterson

"You can see now from my comments that my gut feeling is that the most mature and reliable Christian guidance and understanding comes out of the most immediate and local of settings. The ordinary way. We have to break this cultural habit of sending out for an expert every time we feel we need some assistance. Wisdom is not a matter of expertise." - Eugene Peterson

"And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought it back." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"I am so far from being a pessimist... on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you anymore. ItÂ’s the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"In 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others." - Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

"As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"As the ate afternoon sun shone in Shaw's face and a soft flower-scented wind cooled him, his unhappiness turned to a detachment that was not at all unpleasant. He was utterly alone in the world. This knowledge thrilled him." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Asked who was the worst president, he responded, Oh, there were so many of them. Certainly the silliest was Reagan. The most empty. [George H.W.] Bush is in the running for the worst." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"DonÂ’t call me a spokesman for bisexuality. ItÂ’s like being called a spokesman for blue eyes. It doesnÂ’t mean anything. Everyone is bisexual....I donÂ’t understand the obsession with sex. Norman Mailer often sounds like the deranged commander of an American Legion post, particularly about women, whom he doesnÂ’t like very much. He has made politics out of sex." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority)." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America, painfully brief." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death" - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars, and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"It is not enough merely to win; others must lose." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"WeÂ’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. EverybodyÂ’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like all other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. The Illinois Central Railroad Company selected the site upon which the city is built and this consisted of a vast miasmatic swamp far better suited to mosquito culture than for human beings. From the day the site was chosen by (and of course in the interest of all) said railway company, everything that entered into the building of the town and the development of the city was determined purely from profit considerations and without the remotest concern for the health and comfort of the human beings who were to live there, especially those who had to do all the labor and produce all the wealth." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on Earth." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"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

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"I realize that, in speaking to you this afternoon, there are certain limitations placed upon the right of free speech. I must be exceedingly careful, prudent, as to what I say, and even more careful and prudent as to how I say it. I may not be able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Ignorance alone stands in the way of socialist success. The capitalist parties understand this and use their resources to prevent the workers from seeing the light. Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Some go to prison for stealing, and others for believing that a better system can be provided and maintained than one that makes it necessary for a man to steal in order to live." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"The American people can have anything they want; the trouble is, they don't know what they want." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs