A biography for John Jay Chapmanhasn’t been written yet.
“The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.”
“I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind.”
“A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.”
“Wherever you see a man who gives someone else's corruption, someone else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us.”
“Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.”
“It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.”
“All progress is experimental.”
“The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.”
“Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.”
“People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold.”
“Too much agreement kills the chat.”
“Good government is the outcome of private virtue.”
“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.”
“Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.”