Words matter. These are the best Lincoln Steffens Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The Russian people, sober, are said to be a gentle people.
I am really puzzled to understand myself.
My father, the practical joker, did not care for practical jokes on himself; he did not encourage the practice in me.
If my father could watch my son for a while, he might realize his own immortality.
The doctrine of Jesus is the most revolutionary propaganda that I have ever encountered.
I have been contending all my life, and always with God.
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.
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.
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.
The spirit of graft and of lawlessness is the American spirit.
Nothing fails like success.
If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply any demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government.
My father made with me one serious mistake which I see parents about me making. He got himself somehow into the awkward position of an authority; I thought he knew and was right on everything – for a while.
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.
You ask men in office to be honest; I ask them to serve the public.
Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.
I never heard a Christian sermon preached in a church.
My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being.
I have been over into the future, and it works.
Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.
Most men think graft a sporadic evil, breaking out here and there, with no connection between outbreaks. I shared the same opinion, but very soon I discovered that the graft in the cities always leads to the graft in the State.
If we would vote in mass on the more promising ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other party that is in – then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it.
Whenever anything extraordinary is done in American municipal politics, whether for good or for evil, you can trace it almost invariably to one man. The people do not do it. Neither do the ‘gangs,’ ‘combines,’ or political parties.
My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.
My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion.
