19th-century Journalist Quotes

Heinrich Heine

Jack London

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Emma Goldman

Henry Morton Stanley

Carlo Collodi

Jane Addams

Even the distribution of rations leaves much to be desired; the fatigue party, well-intentioned and sympathetic though it be, often finds itself short of provisions.

Patrick MacGill

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.

Gerald W. Johnson

All through the night, like the tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army.

Richard Harding Davis

But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous, fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.

Henry Morton Stanley

Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance.

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: Try to please everybody.

Herbert Bayard Swope

You can take the whole of the United States of America, from Maine to California and from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, and set it down in the middle of Siberia, without touching anywhere the boundaries of the latter's territory.

The wisest is he that knows only that he knows nothing. God only knows. We mortals are only troubled with morbid little ideas, sired by circumstance and damned by folly. The human head can absorb only the flavorings of its surroundings. We assume that our faith political and our creed religious are founded upon our reason, when they are really made for us by social conditions over which we had little control.

William Cowper Brann

A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers.

Irving Bacheller

Beloved Scotland of the winter and the hills! 'Tis little that thou'lt get from them, but they will make thee hard and brave!

Luck means the hardships and privations which you have not hesitated to endure, the long nights you have devoted to work. Luck means the appointments you have never failed to keep; the trains you have never failed to catch.

The real us present, and it is transfigured... It is everywhere a reality at once immutable and changing. Matter is present, submitted to a luminous phantasmagoria. What Monet paints is the space that exists between himself and things.

Gustave Geffroy

The Book of Nature is issued only in uncut editions, and the scientist has to open its pages one by one as he reads.

To a prison visitor who asked if he were sewing:

Horatio Bottomley

Even if I do not see the fruits, the struggle has been worthwhile. If my life has taught me anything, it is that one must fight.

The advertising man is a liaison between the products of business and the mind of the nation. He must know both before he can serve either.

The mighty steam-engine has its germ in the simple boiler in which the peasant prepares his food. The huge ship is but the expansion of the floating leaf freighted with its cargo of atmospheric dust; and the flying balloon is but the infant's soap-bubble lightly laden and overgrown. But the Telescope, even in its most elementary form, embodies a novel and gigantic idea, without an analogue in nature, and without a prototype in experience

You can't adopt politics as a profession, and remain honest.

Intelligibility is alike the first and the last demand of the understanding.

Cassius Jackson Keyser

O tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?

O God, give me work till the end of my life
And life till the end of my work.

There is no more graceful and healthful accomplishment for a lady than fly-fishing, and there is no reason why a lady should not in every respect, rival a gentleman in the gentle art.

William Cowper Prime

My studies in speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man, running in and out of every hole in the cosmos hunting for the absolute cheese.

Benjamin De Casseres

The hedgerows are set with the crystals of winter, And ripe berries hiding from gay-feathered thieves ; The hand of December, the vigorous tinter, Has browned and encarmined the exquisite leaves.

George Robert Sims

The morning stars sang together. And a person of delicate ear and nice judgment discussed the singing at length, and showed how and wherein one star differed from another, and which was great and which was not. And still the morning stars sang together.

Thomas William Hodgson Crosland