John Jay Chapman Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same—hardihood. Give them raw truth.

John Jay Chapman
If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.

John Jay Chapman
Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.

John Jay Chapman
If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson's volumes. He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.

John Jay Chapman
Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous.

John Jay Chapman
The New Testament, and to a very large extent the Old, is the soul of man. You cannot criticize it. It criticizes you.

John Jay Chapman
Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade but to intensity of self-seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation. Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.

John Jay Chapman
So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid upon all subjects.

John Jay Chapman
A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind.

John Jay Chapman
When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise.

John Jay Chapman
The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy.

John Jay Chapman
The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.

John Jay Chapman
It is necessary to destroy reputations when they are lies. Peace be to their ashes. But war and fire until they be ashes.

John Jay Chapman
I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.

John Jay Chapman
You get the satisfaction of being heard, and that is the whole possible scope of human ambition.

John Jay Chapman
A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

John Jay Chapman
The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.

John Jay Chapman
People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,—that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.

John Jay Chapman
A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.

John Jay Chapman
The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.

John Jay Chapman
The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.

John Jay Chapman
The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.

John Jay Chapman
The world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. You love them because you say, These things were not made, they were seen.

John Jay Chapman
The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.

John Jay Chapman
It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.

John Jay Chapman