“One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.”

I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.

Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!

[John D. Rockefeller] didn’t care about anyone he did anything just to be rich and be the only company standing without any competition. He destroyed anyone else.

My final comment is that I still believe this man [John D. Rockefeller] is corrupt and he used unfair ways to become wealthy, all he cared about was his money and wasn’t considered.

We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.

My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing.

In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make.

No value is destroyed for you – only for the original owner.

Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world.

One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative.

A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.

A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.

There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.

A mind truly cultivated never feels that the intellectual process is complete until it can reproduce in some media the thing which it has absorbed.

It’s always a revolution, you know, when things occur of which you have never happened to hear!

The fellow who isn’t fired with enthusiasm is apt to be fired.

Nothing dispels enthusiasm like a small admission fee.

Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war.

I’ve survived quite a few generations. That’s because I never lost my enthusiasm. I wake up every morning like on Christmas Day, waiting for the gifts.

Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.