546 Quotes by James Russell Lowell

All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious race that had ever lived in it

Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

Among the lessons taught by the French revolution, there is none sadder or more striking than this--that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

With every step of the recent traveler our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those beautiful pictured notes of the possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard coin of the actual.

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail.

Endurance is the crowning quality...

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.