1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: I want to speak to you first of all as regards your duties as boys; and in the next place as regards your duties as men; and the two things hang together. The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and lacks any one of those three traits.
“What I say is that, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.”
Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 24, The Killing of the Divine King.
“The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one
soul, and he has got dozens.”
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
“If a man cannot make his point to keen boys in ten minutes, he ought to be shot!”
The Scouter (November 1928); Reprinted in Footsteps of the Founder (1987)
Homecoming saga, The Memory Of Earth (1992)
With the century, vol. 4
“A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.”
Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce
Misattributed
Travis McGee series, A Purple Place for Dying (1964)
Context: ... it is like what we have done to chickens. Forced growth under optimum conditions, so that in eight weeks they are ready for the mechanical picker. The most forlorn and comical statements are the ones made by the grateful young who say Now I can be ready in two years and nine months to go out in and earn a living rather than wasting 4 years in college. Education is something that should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefore. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man’s reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? Today the good ones, the ones who want to ask why, find no one around with any interest in answering the question, so they drop out, because theirs is the type of mind which becomes monstrously bored at the trade-school concept. A devoted technician is seldom an educated man. He can be a useful man, a contented man, a busy man. But he has no more sense of the mystery and wonder and paradox of existence than does one of those chickens fattening itself for the mechanical plucking, freezing and packaging.
