Great Throughts Treasury

"Nothing can stand against success and yet keep fresh. Nations as well as individuals feel its vulgarizing power."

"How few successful men are interesting! Hannibal, Alcibiades, with Raleigh, Mithridates, and Napoleon, who would compare them for a moment with their mere conquerors?"

"Success, which touches nothing that it does not vulgarize, should be its own reward."

"Poverty, many can endure with dignity. Success, how few can carry off, even with decency and without baring their innermost infirmities before the public gaze!"

"The Malays, the Malagasy, Japanese, Chinese, Red Indians. as Sioux, Comanches, Navajos, Apaches with Zapatecas, Esquimaux, and in the south are ‘n****rs’ though their hair in straight. Turks, Persians, Levantines, Egyptians, Moors, and generally all those of almost any race whose skins are darker than our own, and whose ideas of faith, of matrimony, banking, and therapeutics differ from those held by the dwellers of Primrose Hill, cannot escape. Men of the Latin races, though not born free, can purchase freedom with a price, that is, if they conform to our ideas, are rich and wash, ride bicycles, and gamble on the Stock Exchange. If they are poor then woe betide them, let them paint their faces white with all the ceruse which ever Venice furnished, to the black favor shall they come… At times a thinking man knows scarely what to think, and sometimes doubts whether [God] is the God we took him for and if he is a fitting Deity for us to worship, and if we had not better once for all, get us a God of our own race and fitted for our own ways."