Quotes from John Jay Chapman

Too much agreement kills the chat.

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

If any of you ... have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think.

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.

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

A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

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.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

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.

Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of a generous emotion.

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

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

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

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

You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.

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

It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.

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

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.

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.

One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, - to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.

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