Words matter. These are the best Stephen Vincent Benet Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We cannot be a house divided – divided in will, divided in interest, divided in soul. We cannot be a house divided and live.
Dreaming men are haunted men.
You call my candidate a horse thief, and I call yours a lunatic, and we both of us know it’s just till election day. It’s an American custom, like eating corn on the cob. And, afterwards, we settle down quite peaceably and agree we’ve got a pretty good country – until next election.
Treat a boy like a fool and he’ll act like a fool, I say, but there’s some folks need convincing.
A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain, and eyes like burning antracite – that was Dan’l Webster in his prime.
You can’t depend on the kind of folks people think they are – you’ve got to go by what they do. And I wouldn’t give much for a man that some folks hadn’t thought was a fool, in his time.
It is forbidden to go east, but I have gone, forbidden to go on the great river, but I am there. Open your hearts, you spirits, and hear my song.
You work hard, and you’ll rise. But, if you’ve got any foolish notions, just knock them on the head and forget them.
Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth.
We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy – the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town.
I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat.
Yes, Dan’l Webster’s dead – or, at least, they buried him. But every time there’s a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky.
Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard – very hard – to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a cause and to have lost. Most of all, it is hard to put aside personal prejudices. And yet we must put these things aside.
You can’t do business with a man who doesn’t know the meaning of a contract. You can’t do business with a firm who swears they’ll do one thing one day and does just the opposite the next. You can’t do business with a company who takes your goods on a cash basis and then pays you off in bum harmonicas.
Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
