The Great Thoughts, Revised and Updated: From Abelard to Zola, from Ancient Greece to Contemporary America, the Ideas That Have Shaped the History of Paperback - 1996

First line

Every man, every woman carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.

From the rear cover

Upon its publication, George Seldes's The Great Thoughts instantly took its place as a classic - a treasure house of the seminal ideas that have shaped the intellectual history of the world down through the ages. Seldes, a pivotal figure in the history of American journalism and a tireless researcher, spent the better part of his extraordinary lifetime compiling the thoughts that rule the world, casting his net widely and wisely through the essential works of philosophy, poetry, psychology, economics, politics, memoirs, and letters from the ancient Greeks to the modern Americans. Now Seldes's splendid and important work has been revised and updated to include the great thoughts that have changed our world in the decade since the book's first appearance. Quotations from leaders as varied as Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Yitzhak Rabin, Newt Gingrich, and Jesse Jackson reflect the radical shifts in the world political scene. Toni Morrison and Cornel West speak out on the enduring vitality of African-American culture. Alvin Toffler and Arthur C. Clarke give us a glimpse into the future. Gloria Steinem and Monique Wittig define the motives and the goals of late twentieth-century feminism. Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Wallace Stegner ponder the meaning of wilderness in an increasingly populated and industrialized world. These and scores of other thinkers in all major disciplines have added their voices to this new edition of The Great Thoughts.

Excerpt

"...for liberals, black people are to be "included" and "integrated" into "our" society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be "well behaved" and "worthy of acceptance" by "our" way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life .
--Cornel West Race Matters

"Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up--to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?"
--Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do  language. That may be the measure of our lives."
--Toni Morrison

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have  you had?"
--Henry James, The Ambassadors

"Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave."
--Michael Chabon, "House Hunting"

Media reviews

Citations

• Rec Ref Bks in Paperback, 01/01/2000, Page 13