19th-century Journalist Quotes

The possession of a great many things, even the best of things, tends to blind one to the real value of anything.

Holbrook Jackson

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight!

Elizabeth Chase Allen

Real excellence and humility are consequently not incompatible one with the other; on the contrary, they are twin sisters.

Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

The citron or spicy grove for me would never yield A perfume half so grateful as the lilies of the field.

Astronomy has its practical uses, without which man's intellect would scarcely rouse itself to those speculations; but its greatest result is a revelation of immensity pervaded by one informing mind; and this revelation is made by astronomy only in the same sense in which the telescope reveals the stars to the eye of the astronomer.

Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely.

Isabella Beeton

There is nothing-
No life,
No joy,
No pain-
There is nothing save opinion,
And opinion be damned.

If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation.

Lincoln Steffens

The "new woman" has made her bow upon the stage of life's activities as an independent human being, and she feels her importance; she feels very different from her man-tagged sisters of past generations, who imagined they couldn't move on without man's assistance.

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

Rebecca Harding Davis

Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes, Or any searcher know by mortal mind; Veil upon veil will lift but there must be Veil upon veil behind.

Churches come and go, but there has ever been but one religion. The only religion is conscience in action.

Henry Demarest Lloyd

There is a law which decrees that two objects may not occupy the same place at the same time — result: two people cannot see things from the same point of view, and the slightest difference in angle changes the thing seen.

Mildred Aldrich

But much more vicious than these cases is the majority of foreign correspondents who never have to be placed against the wall, who are never told what to write and how to write it, but who know from contact with the great minds of the press lords or from the simple deduction that the bosses are in big business and the news must be slanted accordingly, or from the general intangible atmosphere which prevails everywhere, what they can do and what they must never do. The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, "I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like."

I am inclined to put the zenith of success-the time of most consideration and public labor -as somewhere in the sixties, say from sixty-five to seventy.

William Robertson Nicoll

After forty years of close acquaintance with it, I've found that work is kind to its friends and harsh to its enemies. It pays the fellow who dislikes it his exact wages, and they're generally pretty small; but it gives the man who shines up to it all the money he wants and throws in a heap of fun and satisfaction for good measure.

George Horace Lorimer

Nothing prevents us from being and remaining the exponents of a united humanity, when we have a country of our own. To fulfill this mission we do not have to remain literally planted among the nations who hate and despise us.

A father is the one friend upon whom we can always rely. In the hour of need, when all else fails, we remember him upon whose knees we sat when children, and who soothed our sorrows; and even though he may be unable to assist us, his mere presence serves to comfort and strengthen us.

Émile Gaboriau

Some people say that the lives of working women are too hard and their education too small for them to become a powerful voice in winning the vote. Such people have forgotten their history.

Sylvia Pankhurst

I wanted to go to a good college, and my mind was set on Wellesley.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

I would not preach tolerance, which seems to me another name for condescension and presupposes faults in those to be tolerated... Nor do I believe in demanding love - that should be the gift of a free will. But simply to be kind - that is not too much to ask of any of us.

Josephine Lawrence

I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is 6 to 5 against.

Everyone needs a warm personal enemy or two to keep him free from rust in the movable parts of his mind.

The air currents of the world never ventilated his mind.

Walter Hines Page

If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.