From the public-domain record · 81,371 quotes
Founders, statesmen and world leaders — cited from their collected works.
The figures
With most men courage is largely an acquired habit, and on the first occasions when it is called for it necessitates the exercise of will-power and self-control; but by exercise it gradually becomes almost automatic.
Where this solidarity ceases to exist, where there is no fellow-feeling, the community is ripe for disaster.
In any healthy community there must be a solidarity of sentiment and a knowledge of solidarity of interest among the different members.
Yet without sympathy, without fellow-feeling, no permanent good can be accomplished.
If sympathy becomes distorted and morbid, it hampers instead of helping the effort toward social betterment.
If a man permits largeness of heart to degenerate into softness of head, he inevitably becomes a nuisance in any relation of life.
It is of just as much importance to the one as to the other that the man from Hester Street or the Bowery or Avenue B, and the man from the Riverside Drive or Fifth Avenue, should have some meeting-ground where they can grow to understand…
Wherever these associations are entered into in a healthy and sane spirit, the good they do is incalculable, from the simple fact that they bring together in pursuit of a worthy common object men of excellent character, who would never…
But the fact remains that the effect of political life, and of the associations that it brings, is of very great benefit in producing a better understanding and a keener fellow-feeling among men who otherwise would know one another not at…
The result is that in a very short time the men whose purposes are the same forget about all differences, save in capacity to carry out the purpose.
Given that he and they have a common object, the one test that he must apply to them is as to their ability to help in achieving that object.
He speedily finds that the quality of successful management, the power to handle men and secure results, may exist in seemingly unlikely persons.
It is often quite as irritating to be patronized as to be plundered; as reformers have more than once discovered when the mass of the voters stolidly voted against them, and in favor of a gang of familiar scoundrels, chiefly because they…
No one can succeed who attempts to go in on any other basis; above all, no one can succeed if he goes in feeling that, instead of merely doing his duty, he is conferring a favor upon the community, and is therefore warranted in adopting an…
If they are to be successful they must necessarily be democratic, in the sense that each man is treated strictly on his merits as a man.
They get down to the naked bed-rock of character and capacity.
Under such circumstances the men who work together for the achievement of a common result in which they are intensely interested are very soon certain to disregard, and, indeed, to forget, the creed or race origin or antecedent social…
A tie may remain between the members of a caste, based merely upon the similarity of their habits of life; but this will be much less strong than the ties based on identity of passion, of principle, or of ways of looking at life.
On the other hand, if the men can be mixed together in some way that will loosen the class or caste bonds and put each on his merits as an individual man, there is certain to be a regrouping independent of caste lines.
The average man, when he has no means of being brought into contact with another, or of gaining any insight into that other’s ideas and aspirations, either ignores these ideas and aspirations completely, or else feels toward them a more or…
As long as men are separated by their caste lines, each body having its own amusements, interests, and occupations, they are certain to regard one another with that instinctive distrust which they feel for foreigners.
The only way to avoid the growth of these evils is, so far as may be, to help in the creation of conditions which will permit mutual understanding and fellow-feeling between the members of different classes.
As a matter of fact, the enormous mass of our legislation and administration ought to be concerned with matters that are strictly for the commonweal; and where special legislation or administration is needed, as it often must be, for a…
This produces the thoroughly unhealthy belief that it is for the interest of one class as against another to have its class representatives dominant in public life.
