78 Quotes by Lincoln Steffens

Somebody must take a chance. The monkeys who became men, and the monkeys who didn't are still jumping around in trees making faces at the monkeys who did.

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

The unknown is the province of the student; it is the field for his life's adventure, and it is a wide field full of beckonings

I have seen the future; and it works. (Following a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919)

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 longer I live, the more I feel that the individual is not so much to blame - not even the worst individuals, not even the 'best' citizens - as the system of corruption which has grown up about us, and which rewards an honest man with a mere living and a crook with all the magnificence of our magnificent modern life.

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.

I am really puzzled to understand myself.

The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.