“More penetrating and pernicious is the influence our ill-devised machinery has upon the character of our national life. It eats in and into it. It degrades candidates and electors alike.”
To My Fellow-Disciples at Saratoga Springs (1895)
Context: We may blunder on in spite of repeated miscalculations of the popular will. More penetrating and pernicious is the influence our ill-devised machinery has upon the character of our national life. It eats in and into it. It degrades candidates and electors alike. It does its worst to reduce to sterility of influence many of the best of the component elements of the people. The individuals survive, but with their political activity dead or dying, no opportunities of life and growth being afforded them. Finally it presents as an embodiment of the nation an assembly or assemblies into which none can enter who have not been clipped, and pared, and trimmed, and stretched out of natural shape and likeness to slip along the grooves of supply. A free press, free pulpits, and a free people outside help to correct what would otherwise become intolerable but press, pulpits and people, free as they are, work and live in strict limits of relation to the machinery established among them. The world revolves on its axis subject to the Constitution of the United States, and the most Radical newspaper man in London, if such there be, never lets his imagination range out of hearing of the Clock Tower.
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Leonard H. Courtney 9
British politician 1832–1918Related quotes
1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)
On relations between the US and the UK, as quoted in "Kingman Brewster Jr., 69, Ex-Yale President and U.S. Envoy, Dies" in The New York Times (9 November 1988)
Book Four, Chapter VI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four
“The phoney [sic] electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!”
2010s, 2012
French: Aujourd'hui, nos nations développées vivent dans l'opulence, l'excès et le gaspillage avec pour conséquences notre environnement qui se dégrade et le climat boulversé.
Source, in French: Jacques Dubochet, Parcours, Éditions Rosso, 2018, page 209 (ISBN 9782940560097).
“Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on.”
Episode 1, Chapter 12
The Power of Myth (1988)
1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)
Context: The policy of keeping the Indians to themselves, has kept the tomahawk and scalping knife busy upon our borders, and has cost us largely in blood and treasure. Our treatment of the negro has lacked humanity and filled the country with agitation and ill-feeling, and brought the nation to the verge of ruin. Before the relations of those two races are satisfactorily settled, and in despite of all opposition, a new race is making its appearance within our borders, and claiming attention. It is estimated that not less than one hundred thousand Chinamen are now within the limits of the United States. Several years ago every vessel, large or small, of steam or of sail, bound to our Pacific coast and hailing from the Flowery kingdom, added to the number and strength of this new element of our population.
Mythopoeia (1931)
1960, Speech at East Los Angeles College Stadium, Los Angeles, California