Quotes from Stephen Vincent Benet

You can't do business with a man who doesn't know the meaning of a contract. You can't do business with a firm who swears they'll do one thing one day and does just the opposite the next. You can't do business with a company who takes your goods on a cash basis and then pays you off in bum harmonicas.

Let us be bold enough and free enough to follow the great examples - the men of good will and honor who put aside little ways and petty hatreds to build the American dream.

Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.

Books are not men and yet they are alive.

American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.

I had lost something in my youth and made money instead.

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

We cannot be a house divided - divided in will, divided in interest, divided in soul. We cannot be a house divided and live.

We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy - the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town.

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard - very hard - to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a cause and to have lost. Most of all, it is hard to put aside personal prejudices. And yet we must put these things aside.

Treat a boy like a fool and he'll act like a fool, I say, but there's some folks need convincing.

You can't depend on the kind of folks people think they are - you've got to go by what they do. And I wouldn't give much for a man that some folks hadn't thought was a fool, in his time.

We can no longer take our own way of life for granted - we know that it may be challenged. And we know this, too - and know it ever more deeply - we know that freedom and democracy are not just big words mouthed by orators but the rain and the wind and the sun, the air and the light by which we breathe and live.

Let each one of us say, 'I am an American. I intend to stay an American. I will do my best to wipe from my heart hate, rancor and political prejudice. I will sustain my government. And, through good days or bad, I will try to serve my country.'

Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.

Life was a storm to wander through.

You work hard, and you'll rise. But, if you've got any foolish notions, just knock them on the head and forget them.

It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.

Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky.

There are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed.

There is a wilderness we walk alone However well-companioned

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Dreaming men are haunted men.