Great Throughts Treasury

"Attack another's rights and you destroy your own."

"All progress is experimental."

"Good government is the outcome of private virtue. "

"Politics is organized hatred, that is unity. "

"The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought. "

"As for boredom ... I notice that it leaves me as soon as I am doing something that has got to be done."

"A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect."

"A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind."

"Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity."

"A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful."

"All language is personal; we cannot hand our faith to one another. This has always been true. Even in the Middle Ages when faith was theoretically uniform it was always practically individual."

"Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself."

"He that is one man's slave is free from none."

"I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns."

"Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same - hardihood. Give them raw truth."

"Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of generous emotion."

"It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep."

"It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you."

"If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people."

"One need not mind stealing, but one must cry out at people whose minds are so befuddled that they do not know theft when they see it."

"Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation."

"People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold."

"People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this, -- that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it."

"The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge."

"The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost."

"Too much agreement kills the chat."

"Virtue is not malicious."

"We cannot hand our faith to one another... Even in the Middle Ages, when faith was theoretically uniform, it was always practically individual."

"The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age."

"There are lots of people who cannot think seriously without injuring their minds."

"Wherever you see a man who gives someone else's corruption, someone else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us."

"We inherit nothing truly, but what our actions make us worthy of."

"You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it."