John Jay Chapman Quotes
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I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.
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You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.
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We cannot hand our faith to one another.... Even in the Middle Ages, when faith was theoretically uniform, it was always practically individual.
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Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of a generous emotion.
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Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous.
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The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think.
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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.
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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.
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A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind.
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A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.
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The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.
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The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.
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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.
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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.
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Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.
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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.
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The men and woman who make the best boon companions seem to have given up hope of doing something else...some defect of talent or opportunity has cut them off from their pet ambition and has thus left them with leisure to take an interest in their lives of others. Your ambition may be, it makes him keep his thoughts at home. But the heartbroken people - if I may use the word in a mild, benevolent sense - the people whose wills are subdued to fate, give us consolation, recognition, and welcome.
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The world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. You love them because you say, These things were not made, they were seen.
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The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.
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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.
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The world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. The Elgin Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason. What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the author's control, and to ideas imposed on him by his vision. So with Beethoven's Symphonies, with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations - with any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love them because you say, These things were not made, they were seen.
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All progress is experimental.
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As for boredom ... I notice that it leaves me as soon as I am doing something that has got to be done.
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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. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart.
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It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.
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A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.
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So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid upon all subjects.
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The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.
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The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.
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Too much agreement kills the chat.
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