I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.
One great blemish in the popular mind of America and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust . . . you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded . . . . Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment.
The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy.
I want every young man who sees me to know that I'm not that different from them. I wasn't born into wealth. I wasn't born into fame. I made a lot of mistakes - but I kept at it.
We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.
Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation.
There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.
Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.