"We know that there is no absolute knowledge, that there are only theories; but we forget this. The better educated we are, the harder we believe in axioms."
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Quote collection
Lincoln Steffens quotes (page 2 of 3)
52 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"My mother would thump me sharply on the head with a thimble or a spoon if I became too noisy with the whistle when I was playing I was a steamboat captain. She had no sense of the dignity of command."
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"Revolt is not reform, and one revolutionary administration is not good government."
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"Chicago will give you a chance. The sporting spirit is the spirit of Chicago."
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"The unknown is the province of the student; it is the field for his lifes adventure, and it is a wide field full of beckonings"
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"he thoughtless knowers will call you a red or a communist or a capitalist or some name that expresses their aversion to any mental activity. But somebody must take a chance. The monkeys did who became men, and the monkeys who didn't are still jumping around in the trees making faces at us monkeys who did."
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"My father would invite me sweetly to come and sit on a stool at his feet, and, as I let myself trustingly down, he would gently kick the seat from under me - and laugh."
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"Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure."
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"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."
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"My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being."
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"In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul."
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"The doctrine of Jesus is the most revolutionary propaganda that I have ever encountered."
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"It is our knowledge - the things we are sure of - that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning."
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"My father, the practical joker, did not care for practical jokes on himself; he did not encourage the practice in me."
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"We need some great failures. Especially we ever-successful Americans - conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures."
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"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."
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"The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle."
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"I am really puzzled to understand myself."
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"The politer the society, the greater the lies it requires."
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"The Soviet government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it."
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