American Quotes

Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.

Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.

Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.

A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses.

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.

Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.

A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.

Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful.

For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

What we've proven is that you can protect the environment, use it wisely and grow the economy and that there is no conflict between the two.

What I finally did in 1995 was I said, I'm going to get out of this town and I'm going to go out West.

Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress.

Well, it's not a pleasant experience. And it's a terribly political process, because that thing was initiated by the Congress and by, you know, our adversaries in the Congress.

Well, I think breathing life into the Endangered Species Act, taking those wolves back into Yellowstone, restoring the salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

We've set aside tens of millions of acres of those northwestern forests for perpetuity. The unemployment rate has gone not up, but down. The economy has gone up.

We have to preserve it and use it sustainably. And the short-term use of resources at the destruction of the long-term heritage of this country is not a policy that we can pursue.

We had kind of a rocky start, but I spent a lot of time working with the President and handing him statistics and showing him what we were doing as we went along and kind of saying to him, you know, this is really important.

This isn't just about today, this about generations to come. And you've got a chance to be the greatest conservation President since Theodore Roosevelt, and I think he's done it.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

Protecting all this land, working with the President to establish all these monuments, to, you know... I think the President has a land protection record that's second to no one in this century, maybe Teddy Roosevelt.

Obviously I wouldn't have said that three or four years ago in the midst of it. But I really believe that. It's been a marvelous and important experience.

No kidding. That's really true. You're paying your own bills through this. It's not a pleasant experience.

Look, this job has always been a crucible of conflict.