You don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I didn’t like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I’ve been trying to change it ever since.
It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.
An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.
Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.
I am sustained by a sense of the worthwhileness of what I am doing; a trust in the good faith of the process which created and sustains me. That process I call God.
We define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.
They use everything about the hog except the squeal.
It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little comer of the high mansions of the sky.
I just put on what the lady says. I’ve been married three times, so I’ve had lots of supervision.
Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.
If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.
American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.
I don’t know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do, they will find two words there- ‘social justice.’ For that is what I have believed in and fought for.
Can you blame me if I am pursued by the thought of how much we could do to remedy social evils, if only we had an honest and disinterested press?
Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.
Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting impulse.
I have not only found good health, but perfect health; I have found a new state of being, a potentiality of life; a sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness, such as I did not know could exist in the human body.
It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the “cooler,” and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.
The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it – and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived.
In the twilight, it was a vision of power.
In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.