Lincoln Steffens Quotes - Page 2

And an educated mind is nothing but the God-given mind of a child after his parents' and his grandparents' generation have got through molding it. We can't help teaching you; you will ask that of us; but we are prone to teach you what we know, and I am going, now and again, to warn you: Remember we really don't know anything. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don't know. That is your playground, bare and graveled, safe and unbreakable.

Care like hell! Sit around the bars and drink, and pose, and pretend, all you want to, but in reality, deep down underneath, care like hell.

The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.

I hunted far enough to suspect that the Fathers of the Republic who wrote our Sacred Constitution of the United States not only did not, but did not want to, establish a democratic government.

My summary of all our experiences was that it showed that heaven and hell are one place, and we all go there. To those who are prepared, it is heaven; to those who are not fit and ready, it is hell.

In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul.

Revolt is not reform, and one revolutionary administration is not good government.

My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being.

Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure.

We need some great failures. Especially we ever-successful Americans - conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures.

If my father could watch my son for a while, he might realize his own immortality.

My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion.

My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.

I let my boy go and do and say pretty much as he likes, as, and perhaps because, my father kept no string on me.

he thoughtless knowers will call you a red or a communist or a capitalist or some name that expresses their aversion to any mental activity. But somebody must take a chance. The monkeys did who became men, and the monkeys who didn't are still jumping around in the trees making faces at us monkeys who did.

My father would invite me sweetly to come and sit on a stool at his feet, and, as I let myself trustingly down, he would gently kick the seat from under me - and laugh.

I am really puzzled to understand myself.

One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.

So youve been over into Russia? said Bernard Baruch, and I answered very literally, I have been over into the future and it works.

I never heard a Christian sermon preached in a church.

The unknown is the province of the student; it is the field for his lifes adventure, and it is a wide field full of beckonings

I have been contending all my life, and always with God.

My father, the practical joker, did not care for practical jokes on himself; he did not encourage the practice in me.

The Soviet government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it.

My mother would thump me sharply on the head with a thimble or a spoon if I became too noisy with the whistle when I was playing I was a steamboat captain. She had no sense of the dignity of command.