Top 57 Steffens Quotes
#1. Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure.
Lincoln Steffens
#4. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#5. Choose the things that matter to God. See things as He sees them. Whatever results, that is the best way.
Jason M. Steffens
#6. You ask men in office to be honest; I ask them to serve the public.
Lincoln Steffens
#7. 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
Lincoln Steffens
#8. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#9. The spirit of graft and of lawlessness is the American spirit.
Lincoln Steffens
#10. You should never nag, whine, preach or plead with your dog because this is not the way leaders behave
Lisa Steffens
#11. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#12. If my father could watch my son for a while, he might realize his own immortality.
Lincoln Steffens
#13. First in violence, deepest in dirt, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a - village, the "tough" among cities, a spectacle for the nation.
Lincoln Steffens
#15. The typical American citizen is the business man. The typical business man is a bad citizen; he is busy. If he is a 'big business man' and very busy, he does not neglect; he is busy with politics, oh, very busy and very businesslike.
Lincoln Steffens
#16. It is privilege that causes evil in the world, not wickedness, and not men.
Lincoln Steffens
#17. Why is it that the less intelligence people have, the more spiritual they are? They seem to fill all the vacant, ignorant spaces in their heads with soul. Which explains how it is that the less knowledge they have, the more religion.
Lincoln Steffens
#18. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#19. Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.
Lincoln Steffens
#20. It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done; not often.
Lincoln Steffens
#21. It is so easy to have our eyes opened, but then close them again, pretend it never happened, and go back to doing what has always been done.
Jason M. Steffens
#23. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#25. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#26. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don't know
Lincoln Steffens
#27. It is our knowledge - the things we are sure of - that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.
Lincoln Steffens
#28. The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.
Lincoln Steffens
#29. My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being.
Lincoln Steffens
#30. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#31. My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion.
Lincoln Steffens
#32. You can't control a young horse unless you control yourself.
Lincoln Steffens
#33. The doctrine of Jesus is the most revolutionary propaganda that I have ever encountered.
Lincoln Steffens
#34. My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.
Lincoln Steffens
#35. If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation.
Lincoln Steffens
#36. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#37. Somebody must take a chance. There are monkeys who became men, and the monkeys who didn't are still jumping around in trees making faces at the monkeys who did.
Lincoln Steffens
#38. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#39. The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle.
Lincoln Steffens
#40. Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.
Lincoln Steffens
#42. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#43. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#44. We know that there is no absolute knowledge, that there are only theories; but we forget this. The better educated we are, the harder we believe in axioms.
Lincoln Steffens
#45. We need some great failures. Especially we ever-successful Americans - conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures.
Lincoln Steffens
#46. Revolt is not reform, and one revolutionary administration is not good government.
Lincoln Steffens
#48. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#49. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#50. The politer the society, the greater the lies it requires.
Lincoln Steffens
#51. My father, the practical joker, did not care for practical jokes on himself; he did not encourage the practice in me.
Lincoln Steffens
#52. 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.
Lincoln Steffens
#53. Chicago will give you a chance. The sporting spirit is the spirit of Chicago.
Lincoln Steffens
#56. The only thing worth having in an earthly existence is a sense of humor.
Lincoln Steffens
#57. In all cities, the better classes - the business men - are the sources of corruption, but they are so rarely pursued and caught that we do not fully realize whence the trouble comes.
Lincoln Steffens
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