John Jay Chapman Quotes

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.

All progress is experimental.

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.

Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous.

Attack another's rights and you destroy your own.

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

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

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.

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

Too much agreement kills the chat.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

There are plenty of people to whom the crucial problem of their lives never get presented in terms that they can understand.

The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.

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

The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think.

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

When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise.

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

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.

If any of you ... have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

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

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

So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid upon all subjects.

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

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

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

The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.

A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.

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

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