“To denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”

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!

Were it alone in these methods, public scorn would long ago have made short work of the Standard Oil Company. But it is simply the most conspicuous type of what can be done by these practices.

We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war or industry. A moment’s rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference.

The only reason I am glad I am a woman is because I will not have to marry one.

One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical.

The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.

I decided to write the book to open the eyes of the people of how corrupt John D. Rockefeller company was and the unfair ways he used to be successful.

Cheerful endurance of hardships and contempt of surroundings become a virtue in a pioneer. Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States.

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

In every forest, on every farm, in every orchard on earth, it’s what’s under the ground that creates what’s above the ground. That’s why placing your attention on the fruits that you have already grown is futile.

God has privileged us in Christ Jesus to live above the ordinary human plane of life. Those who want to be ordinary and live on a lower plane can do so, but as for me, I will not.

We may treat of the Soul as in the body – whether it be set above it or actually within it – since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.Now from this relation.

As in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.

The day you stop doing the small things is the day you think you’re above everybody else.