Quotes from Lincoln Steffens

We need some great failures. Especially we ever-successful Americans - conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures.

My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.

I hunted far enough to suspect that the Fathers of the Republic who wrote our Sacred Constitution of the United States not only did not, but did not want to, establish a democratic government.

The Russian people, sober, are said to be a gentle people.

My father made with me one serious mistake which I see parents about me making. He got himself somehow into the awkward position of an authority; I thought he knew and was right on everything - for a while.

The Soviet government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it.

The typical American citizen is the business man. The typical business man is a bad citizen; he is busy. If he is a 'big business man' and very busy, he does not neglect; he is busy with politics, oh, very busy and very businesslike.

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

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.

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.

I let my boy go and do and say pretty much as he likes, as, and perhaps because, my father kept no string on me.

Most men think graft a sporadic evil, breaking out here and there, with no connection between outbreaks. I shared the same opinion, but very soon I discovered that the graft in the cities always leads to the graft in the State.

"So you've been over into Russia?" said Bernard Baruch, and I answered very literally, "I have been over into the future, and it works."

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story.

The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.

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.

It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done; not often.

I have seen the future, and it works.