Lincoln Steffens

“My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being.”

“I have been contending all my life, and always with God.”

“Chicago will give you a chance. The sporting spirit is the spirit of Chicago.”

“The spirit of graft and of lawlessness is the American spirit.”

“My mother would thump me sharply on the head with a thimble or a spoon if I became too noisy with the whistle when I was playing I was a steamboat captain. She had no sense of the dignity of command.”

“If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply any demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government.”

“Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.”

“An educated mind is nothing but the God-given mind of a child after his parents’ and his grandparents’ generation have got through molding it. We can’t help teaching you; you will ask that of us; but we are prone to teach you what we know, and I am going, now and again, to warn you:Remember we really don’t know anything. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don’t know. That is your playground, bare and graveled, safe and unbreakable.”

“In all cities, the better classes - the business men - are the sources of corruption, but they are so rarely pursued and caught that we do not fully realize whence the trouble comes.”

“I have been over into the future, and it works.”

“If my father could watch my son for a while, he might realize his own immortality.”

“One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.”

“Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.”

“If we would vote in mass on the more promising ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other party that is in - then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it.”

“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.”

“Revolt is not reform, and one revolutionary administration is not good government.”

“Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure.”

“My father would invite me sweetly to come and sit on a stool at his feet, and, as I let myself trustingly down, he would gently kick the seat from under me - and laugh.”

“morality is moral only when it is voluntary”

“You ask men in office to be honest; I ask them to serve the public.”