Herbert Croly Quotes

32 quotes in 595 categories

• In the long run men inevitably become the victims of their wealth. They adapt their lives and habits to their money, not their money to…
• The average American is nothing if not patriotic.
• The national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realization of a…
• Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility. If human nature cannot be improved by institutions, democracy is at best a…
• If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow man, the organization of democracy should be…
• The majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized works, or even by grave…
• I am not concerned with dodging the odium of the word. The proposed definition of democracy is socialistic . . . (democracy) should be characterized…
• I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism,…
• Democracy may mean something more than a theoretically absolute popular government, but it assuredly cannot mean anything less.
• American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation.
• Had it not been for the Atlantic Ocean and the virgin wilderness, the United States would never have been the Land of Promise.
• In Jefferson's mind democracy was tantamount to extreme individualism.
• Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American mind with free political institutions.
• Of course, Americans have no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith.
• The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.
• So far I, at least, have no fault to find with implications of Hamilton's Federalism, but unfortunately his policy was in certain other respects tainted…
• The adoption by Jefferson and the Republicans of the political structure of their opponents is of an importance hardly inferior to that of the adoption…
• The American economic, political, and social organization has given to its citizens the benefits of material prosperity, political liberty, and a wholesome natural equality; and…
• The more consciously democratic Americans became, however, the less they were satisfied with a conception of the Promised Land, which went no farther than a…
• The Constitution was the expression not only of a political faith, but also of political fears. It was wrought both as the organ of the…

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