The author was a journalist who made a point of noting key thoughts when he came upon them while reading. Thus, the book is mostly one person's presentation of what he read during his life, which is fine.

In general, quote books can be unsatisfying since they present small, out-of-context snippets of ideas. That was expected. The issue here turned out to be the title.

"Great thoughts" generally suggests ideas that have stood the test of time and been found to be true. This book devotes 8.5 pages to quotes from Freud, about as many to Marx, Lenin, Nietzsche .... you get the point. While these people have certainly affected Western civilization, at least recently, they have also been proven to be totally wrong, often at tremendous cost to the civilization they have experimented upon.

Can erroneous thoughts be "great thoughts"? If you think so, this book will be fine for you. Me, it drives up the wall.

The author deliberately excludes quotes from religious figures, assessing there is so much already out there, it's redundant. This seems to undercut the idea of illuminating the underlying ideas of civilization, but I guess Marx and Lenin need more exposure.

In skipping and out, as quote books require, I found little from those who opposed such ideas, repeated in this book of "greats", even long before they enslaved billions and collapsed the societies who adopted them. The author rather grudgingly admits conservatism is part of western tradition, but that's about it. It is significant the book was picked for update/revision after the collapse of the the Soviet Union. Do "great" thoughts need revision? These do.

Basically, if the book had been called "Influential Ideas of Modern Material Humanism", there would be no complaint here.

A much better book of short anecdotes might be "Condemned to Repeat It: The Philosopher Who Flunked Life and Other Great Lessons From History"

This book was originally put together by a very successful journalist who had access to the most famous people of the times. Interestingly, various editions are, or at least, have been available in either author or subject categorized.

I really like the quotes Seldes selected and this is one of the 30 or 40 books (from among the 400+ quote books I own) I use most (in the subject listed format) to dig up quotes for topics I am researching.

It's not one of the top five I'd buy, but if you see one one sale, grab it. It's a nice one to add to a quotation collection or to give as a gift. ALso, the price is better than many others, and it's another book you can often get for just a few dollars at a used book shop or through one of the used book web vendors.

The Great Thoughts was the first quote book that I used for writing cases in Lincoln Douglas debate in High School. I found that the quotations were thorough and wide-ranging. The Great Thoughts contains many useful authors from all time periods and all races. I have used quotations from Mahatma Ghandi to Plato. Another added bonus is that the book comes with longer quotations. A longer quote insures that a reader won't take a quote out of context. I've used The Great Thoughts for Debate, for school papers, and for my job as a writer at my school newspaper. I reccommend the Great Thoughts without any hesitations.