Great Throughts Treasury

"Gossiping and lying go hand in hand." - English Proverbs

"Hard work never did anyone any harm." - English Proverbs

"Many words will not fill a bushel." - English Proverbs

"And now, if you still press the question, why should God make provision for forgiveness, to an extent he knew would be unnecessary, and be guilty of an expenditure of means beyond what the well-known circumstances of the case required, We answer, by referring you to the characteristic of universality, to which we have already adverted, as marking his dispensations in the natural world, and ask you why his sun shines and wastes its beams upon sightless eye-balls, or upon those who will not open their eyes to behold his goodly rays? Why does he send his rains upon the barren rock, or waste his showers upon the sandy and sterile soil, in which the seed can never vegetate? If I propose this question, you tell me in reply, that I mistake altogether the nature of God’s creations, and the general principles of the system which he has established. You tell me that the necessity for the sun being what it is, does not depend upon the number of the persons who are to be enlightened by his rays, but grows out of the fact that it must be what it is to give light to any one–that atmospheric laws are general, and cannot in their nature be so arranged as to secure the descent of rain only where it will render the earth productive. You cannot consider that there is any waste of light or moisture, because there are some who do not see, or because in some places the surface of the earth presents the impervious rock to the rains of heaven." - Erskine Mason

"The Lives of Others, a 2006 Oscar-winning German drama, with its sharp portrayal of pervasive surveillance activities of the Stasi, GDR’s secret police, helps to put things into perspective. Focusing on the meticulous work of a dedicated Stasi officer who has been assigned to snoop on the bugged apartment of a brave East German dissident, the film reveals just how costly surveillance used to be. Recording tape had to be bought, stored and processed; bugs had to be installed one by one; Stasi officers had to spend days and nights on end glued to their headphones, waiting for their subjects to launch into an antigovernment tirade or inadvertently disclose other members of their network. And this line of work also took a heavy psychological toll on its practitioners: the Stasi anti-hero of the film, living alone and given to bouts of depression, patronizes prostitutes – apparently at the expense of his understanding employer. As the Soviet Union began crumbling, a high-ranking KGB officer came forward with a detailed description of how much effort it took to bug an apartment: “Three teams are usually required for that purpose: One team monitors the place where that citizen works; a second team monitors the place where the spouse works. Meanwhile, a third team enters the apartment and establishes observation posts one floor above and one floor below the apartment. About six people enter the apartment wearing soft shoes; they move aside a bookcase, for example, cut a square opening in the wallpaper, drill a hole in the wall, place the bug inside, and glue the wallpaper back. The artist on the team airbrushes the spot so carefully that one cannot notice any tampering. The furniture is replaced, the door is closed, and the wiretappers leave.” Given such elaborate preparations, the secret police had to discriminate and go only for well-known high-priority targets. The KGB may have been the most important institution of the Soviet regime, but its resources were still finite; they simply could not afford to bug everyone who looked suspicious. Despite such tremendous efforts, surveillance did not always work as planned. Even the toughest security offices – like the protagonist of the German film – had their soft spots and often developed feelings of empathy for those under surveillance, sometimes going so far as to tip them off about upcoming searches and arrests. The human factor could thus ruin months of diligent surveillance work. The shift of communications into the digital realm solves many of the problems that plagued surveillance in the analog age. Digital surveillance is much cheaper: Storage space is infinite, equipment retails for next to nothing, and digital technology allows doing more with less. Moreover, there is no need to read every single word in an email to identify its most interesting parts; one can simply search for certain keywords – “democracy”, “opposition”, “human rights”, or simply the names of the country’s opposition leaders – and focus only on particular segments of the conversation. Digital bugs are also easier to conceal. While seasoned dissidents knew they constantly had to search their own apartments looking for the bug or, failing that, at least tighten their lips, knowing that the secret police was listening, this is rarely an option with digital surveillance. How do you know that someone else is reading your email?" - Evgeny Morozov

"In the minds of women, fatherhood used to be considered a part-time job. It was something men did at the end of the day between parking the car for the night and going to bed." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Mothers-in-law who wear a black armband to the wedding are expendable." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course, I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, "How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt." - Ernest Becker

"To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life." - Ernest Becker

"Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time)." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia, Karkov grinned and began. First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls from them, then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool. Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. that is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Let us consider man the first moment of his existence; his mind immediately feels different sensations; such as light, colors, pain, pleasure, motion, rest: these arc his first thoughts." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"Memory, as we have seen, consists only in the power of reviving the signs of our ideas, or the circumstances that attended them; a power which never takes place, except when by the analogy of the signs we have chosen, and by the order we have settled between our ideas, the objects which we want to revive are connected with some of our present wants." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"With regard to natural cries, this man shall form them, as soon as he feels the passions to which they belong. However they will not be signs in respect to him the first time; because instead of reviving .his perceptions, they will as yet be no more than consequences of those perceptions." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

"But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you — and other people — any trouble." - Eudora Welty

"It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before." - Eudora Welty

"It is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts." - Eugene Peterson

"The mistake we so often make is thinking that GodÂ’s interest and care for us waxes and wanes according to our spiritual temperature." - Eugene Peterson

"The story behind the writing of The Message (this was especially interesting to me)." - Eugene Peterson

"Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, donÂ’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy." - Eugene Peterson

"We learn to live not by our feelings about God but by the facts about God. If I break my leg I do not become less a person. My wife and children do not reject me. Neither when my faith fractures or my feelings bruise does God cast me off and reject me." - Eugene Peterson

"You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in spiritual direction. Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters." - Eugene Peterson

"A genius with the IQ of a moron." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"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

"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"TodayÂ’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they canÂ’t read them either." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word." - Eugenio Montale

"Down on your knees, and thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love." - Euripedes NULL

"When roused to rage the maddening populace storms, their fury, like a rolling flame, bursts forth unquenchable; but give its violence ways, it spends itself, and as its force abates, learns to obey and yields it to your will." - Euripedes NULL

"But what has been often urged as a consideration of much more weight, is not only the opinion of the better sort, but the general consent of mankind to this great truth; which I think could not possibly have come to pass, but from one of the three following reasons: either that the idea of a God is innate and co-existent with the mind itself; or that this truth is so very obvious that it is discovered by the first exertion of reason in persons of the most ordinary capacities; or, lastly, that it has been delivered down to us through all ages by a tradition from the first man. The Atheists are equally confounded, to whichever of these three causes we assign it." - Eustace Budgell

"Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"Other nations use "force"; we Britons alone use "Might." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"What is adolescence without trash?" - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"Mr. President, there is no royal road to a balanced budget. If there is, I have never discovered it in all the time I have been dealing with the millions of little figures that come to us in what looks like an unexpurgated mail-order catalog but what we call the budget of the United States, which contains some 1,100 pages." - Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen

"I speak of honor-your honor to God-your honor to country-your honor to self. I sincerely believe it to be the cure to most of our ills, both on a national or individual basis." - Ezra Taft Benson

"May we be worthy of the freedoms that have been provided us in our Constitution, and equal to the trials and tests that shall surely come. We truly have special and individual responsibilities to befriend and to defend that “glorious standard,” our Constitution." - 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

"And we have friends and no butlers." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound