The New Freedom quotes

A very different thing.

You never saw a corporation, any more than you ever saw a government.

Many a workingman today never saw the body of men who are conducting the industry in which he is employed. And they never saw him.

There are some men of that sort. I don’t know how they sleep o’ nights, but there are men of that kind. Thank God, they are not numerous.

The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.

The modern corporation is not engaged in business as an individual. When we deal with it, we deal with an impersonal element, an immaterial piece of society.

Do they even attempt to distinguish between a man’s act as a corporation director and as an individual? They do not. Our laws still deal with us on the basis of the old system.

The law is still living in the dead past which we have left behind.

This is evident, for instance, with regard to the matter of employers’ liability for workingmen’s injuries.

The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men.

Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.

There has come over the land that un-American set of conditions which enables a small number of men who control the government to get favors from the government; by those favors to exclude their fellows from equal business opportunity;

You cannot begin such an enterprise as those that have made America until you are so authenticated, until you have succeeded in obtaining the goodwill of large allied capitalists.

Is that freedom? That is dependence, not freedom.

We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman’s uniform, and say, “Now don’t anybody hurt anybody else.”

These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions.

We are in a new world, struggling under old laws.

As we go inspecting our lives today, surveying this new scene of centralized and complex society, we shall find many more things out of joint.

Don’t you know that this country from one end to the other believes that something is wrong? What an opportunity it would be for some man without conscience to spring up and say: “This is the way. Follow me!”—and lead in paths of destruction!

The old order changeth⁠—changeth under our very eyes, not quietly and equably, but swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult of reconstruction.

I suppose that all struggle for law has been conscious, that very little of it has been blind or merely instinctive.

… want to forget something, the men who filled yesterday with something they would rather not recollect today, and so go about seeking diversion, seeking abstraction in something that will blot out recollection, or seeking to put something into them which will blot out all recollection.

Change is not worth while unless it is improvement.

If I move out of my present house because I do not like it, then I have got to choose a better house, or build a better house, to justify the change.

We have had political leaders whose conception of greatness was to be forever frantically doing something—it mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, without sense of the energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession.

Now, life does not consist of eternally running to a fire.

There is no virtue in going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there. The direction is just as important as the impetus of motion.

restless, vociferous men, without sense of the energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession. Now, life does not consist of eternally running to a fire. There is no virtue in going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there.

The direction is just as important as the impetus of motion.

All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going, and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how fast we were going or where we were going.

Elephants and even other animals have been known to turn treadmills, making a good deal of noise, and causing certain wheels to go round, and I daresay grinding out some sort of product for somebody, but without achieving much progress.

Lately, in an effort to persuade the elephant to move, really, his friends tried dynamite. It moved⁠—in separate and scattered parts, but it moved.

A cynical but witty Englishman said, in a book, not long ago, that it was a mistake to say of a conspicuously successful man, eminent in his line of business, that you could not bribe a man like that, because, he said, the point about …

Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.”

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing.

It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

… us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written.

It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action.

Unless we can translate it into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of the sires who acted in response to its challenge.

And when he wakes up, the country will be empty. He will be deserted, and he will wonder what has happened. Nothing has happened. The world has been going on.

The world has a habit of going on. The world has a habit of leaving those behind who won’t go with it.

The world has always neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he excites my sympathy. He is going to be so lonely before it is all over. And we are good fellows, we are good company; why doesn’t he come along?

The world has a habit of going on. The world has a habit of leaving those behind who won’t go with it. The world has always neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he excites my sympathy.

He is going to be so lonely before it is all over.

And we are good fellows, we are good company; why doesn’t he come along? We are not going to do him any harm. We are going to show him a good time.

“Gentlemen, in considering these things suppose you consider the whole country? Suppose you consider the citizens of the United States?”

I don’t want a smug lot of experts to sit down behind closed doors in Washington and play Providence to me.

There is a Providence to which I am perfectly willing to submit. But as for other men setting up as Providence over myself, I seriously object. I have never met a political savior in the flesh, and I never expect to meet one.

There is a Providence to which I am perfectly willing to submit. But as for other men setting up as Providence over myself, I seriously object.

I have never met a political savior in the flesh, and I never expect to meet one.

I am reminded of Gillet Burgess’ verses:

I am one of those who absolutely reject the trustee theory, the guardianship theory.

I have never found a man who knew how to take care of me, and, reasoning from that point out, I conjecture that there isn’t any man who knows how to take care of all the people of the United States.

I suspect that the people of the United States understand their own interests better than any group of men in the confines of the country understand them.

I do not believe that there is any group of men of any kind to whom we can afford to give that kind of trusteeship.

I will not live under trustees if I can help it.

No group of men less than the majority has a right to tell me how I have got to live in America.

For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because

I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge.

If a man does not know enough to know what the consequences are going to be to the country, then he cannot govern the country in a way that is for its benefit.

The great struggling unknown masses of the men who are at the base of everything are the dynamic force that is lifting the levels of society.

A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.

So the first and chief need of this nation of ours today is to include in the partnership of government all those great bodies of unnamed men who are going to produce our future leaders and renew the future energies of America.

And as I confess that, as I confess my belief in the common man, I know what I am saying.

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

The man who is in the melee knows what blows are being struck and what blood is being drawn. The man who is on the make is the judge of what is happening in America, not the man who has made good;

shall be renewed in hope, in conscience, in strength, by waters welling up from its own sweet, perennial springs. Not from above; not by patronage of its aristocrats.

The flower does not bear the root, but the root the flower.

Everything that blooms in beauty in the air of heaven draws its fairness, its vigor, from its roots. Nothing living can blossom into fruitage unless through nourishing stalks deep-planted in the common soil. The rose is merely the evidence of the vitality of the root;

Because the chief difficulty our politics has suffered is that the inside didn’t look like the outside.

Nothing clears the air like frank discussion.

One of the valuable lessons of my life was due to the fact that at a comparatively early age in my experience as a public speaker I had the privilege of speaking in Cooper Union in New York.

I have met some gentlemen who professed they did. I have even met some business men who professed they held in their own single comprehension the business of the United States; but I am educated enough to know that they do not.

Education has this useful effect, that it narrows of necessity the circles of one’s egotism.

No student knows his subject. The most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know with regard to it. That is also the position of a statesman. No statesman understands the whole country.

It makes a man’s heart ache to think that he cannot be sure that he is doing it for them; to wonder whether they are longing for something that he does not understand.

He prays God that something will bring into his consciousness what is in theirs

, so that the whole nation may feel at last released from its dumbness, feel at last that there is no invisible force holding it back from its goal, feel at last that there is hope and confidence and that the road may be trodden …

… up the partnerships between money and power which now block us at every turn, then we shall see our way to accomplish all the handsome things which platforms promise in vain if they do not start at the point where stand the gates of liberty.

I am not afraid of the American people getting up and doing something. I am only afraid they will not

; and when I hear a popular vote spoken of as mob government, I feel like telling the man who dares so to speak that he has no right to call himself an American.

in that case they owe it to themselves to come out and operate in the light. The very fact that so much in politics is done in the dark, behind closed doors, promotes suspicion.

Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

So, our honest politicians and our honorable corporation heads owe it to their reputations to bring their activities out into the open.

but if you saw one of your immediate neighbors coming the other way on a camel—you would behave yourself until he got out of sight.

The most dangerous thing in the world is to get off where nobody knows you.

I advise you to stay around among the neighbors, and then you may keep out of jail. That is the only way some of us can keep out of jail.

Nothing checks all the bad practices of politics like public exposure.

You can’t be crooked in the light.

I don’t know whether it has ever been tried or not; but I venture to say, purely from observation, that it can’t be done.

Publicity is one of the purifying elements of politics.

The best thing that you can do with anything that is crooked is to lift it up where people can see that it is crooked, and then it will either straighten itself out or disappear.

Nothing checks all the bad practices of politics like public exposure. You can’t be crooked in the light. I don’t know whether it has ever been tried or not; but I venture to say, purely from observation, that it can’t be done.

I am digging the dirt, and laying the hole.” It was probably the same Irishman who, seen digging around the wall of a house, was asked, “Pat, what are you doing?” And he answered, “Faith, I am letting the dark out of the cellar.”

Now, that’s exactly what we want to do⁠—let the dark out of the cellar.

Take, first, the relations existing between politics and business.

There need have been nothing sinister about this. If the whole matter had been open and candid and honest, public criticism would not have centred upon it. But the use of money always results in demoralization, and goes beyond demoralization to actual corruption.

There are two kinds of corruption⁠—the crude and obvious sort, which consists in direct bribery, and the much subtler, more dangerous, sort, which consists in a corruption of the will.

Business men who have tried to set up a control in politics through the machine have more and more deceived themselves, have allowed themselves to think that the whole matter was a necessary means of self-defence, have said that it was a necessary outcome of …

… that there can be no confidences as against the people with respect to their government, and that it is the duty of every public officer to explain to his fellow-citizens whenever he gets a chance—explain exactly what is going on inside of his own office.

There is no air so wholesome as the air of utter publicity.

There are other tracts of modern life where jungles have grown up that must be cut down. Take, for example, the entirely illegitimate extensions made of the idea of private property for the benefit of modern corporations and trusts.

or, rather, not interest on their investments, because that is an incorrect word—on their alleged capitalization.

Here we have a lot of giants staggering along under an almost intolerable weight of artificial burdens, which they have put on their own backs, and constantly looking about lest some little pygmy with a round stone in a sling may come out and slay them.

For my part, I want the pygmy to have a chance to come out.

That is the difference between a big business and a trust. A trust is an arrangement to get rid of competition, and a big business is a business that has survived competition by conquering in the field of intelligence and economy.

A trust does not bring efficiency to the aid of business; it buys efficiency out of business.

I am for big business, and I am against the trusts.

A trust does not bring efficiency to the aid of business; it buys efficiency out of business.

I am for big business, and I am against the trusts.

Any man who can survive by his brains, any man who can put the others out of the business by making the thing cheaper to the consumer at the same time that he is increasing its intrinsic value and quality, I take off my hat …

it has never thriven on monopoly. It is a great deal better to shift for yourselves than to be taken care of by a great combination of capital. I, for my part, do not want to be taken care of.

I would rather starve a free man than be fed a mere thing at the caprice of those who are organizing American industry as they please to organize it.

I know, and every man in his heart knows, that the only way to enrich America is to make it possible for any man who has the brains to get into the game.

it is very attractive; there were planks in that platform which stir all the sympathies of the heart; they proposed things that we all want to do; but the question is, Who is going to do them? Through whose instrumentality?

Are Americans ready to ask the trusts to give us in pity what we ought, in justice, to take?

The third party says that the present system of our industry and trade has come to stay.

Don’t you realize that that is a blind alley? You can’t find your way to liberty that way.

You can’t find your way to social reform through the forces that have made social reform necessary.

The fundamental part of such a program is that the trusts shall be recognized as a permanent part of our economic order, and that the government shall try to make trusts the ministers, the instruments, through which the life of this country shall be justly …

It is a mere enterprise, so far as that part of it is concerned, of making the monopolies philanthropic.

I do not want to live under a philanthropy.

I do not want to be taken care of by the government, either directly, or by any instruments through which the government is acting. I want only to have right and justice prevail, so far as I am concerned.

I said not long ago that Mr. Roosevelt was promoting a plan for the control of monopoly which was supported by the United States Steel Corporation. Mr. Roosevelt denied that he was being supported by more than one member of that corporation.

He was thinking of money. I was thinking of ideas.

I did not say that he was getting money from these gentlemen; it was a matter of indifference to me where he got his money; but it was a matter of a great deal of difference to me where he got his ideas.

It has a master now—those who in combination control these monopolies. And if the government controlled by the monopolies in its turn controls the monopolies, the partnership is finally consummated.

I don’t care how benevolent the master is going to be, I will not live under a master.

That is not what America was created for. America was created in order that every man should have the same chance as every other man to exercise mastery over his own fortunes.

I don’t care how benevolent the master is going to be, I will not live under a master. That is not what America was created for.

America was created in order that every man should have the same chance as every other man to exercise mastery over his own fortunes.

What I want to do is analogous to what the authorities of the city of Glasgow did with tenement houses.

but there is a corner on the poolers in the furnaces, there is a corner on the men who dive down into the mines; they are in the grip of a controlling power which determines the market rates of wages in the United States.

Only where labor is free is labor highly paid in America.

When I am fighting monopolistic control, therefore, I am fighting for the liberty of every man in America, and I am fighting for the liberty of American industry.

I do not trust any promises of a change of temper on the part of monopoly.

Monopoly never was conceived in the temper of tolerance.

Monopoly never was conceived with the purpose of general development. It was conceived with the purpose of special advantage. Has monopoly been very benevolent to its employees? Have the trusts had a soft heart for the working people of America?

We have a great program of governmental assistance ahead of us in the cooperative life of the nation; but we dare not enter upon that program until we have freed the government. That is the point.

Benevolence never developed a man or a nation.

We do not want a benevolent government. We want a free and a just government. Every one of the great schemes of social uplift which are now so much debated by noble people amongst us is based, when rightly conceived, upon justice, not upon benevolence.

If they were dishonest, we might put them out of business by law; since most of them are honest, we can put them out of business only by making it impossible for them to realize their genuine convictions.

I am not afraid of a knave. I am not afraid of a rascal. I am afraid of a strong man who is wrong, and whose wrong thinking can be impressed upon other persons by his own force of character and force of speech.

If God had only arranged it that all the men who are wrong were rascals, we could put them out of business very easily, because they would give themselves away sooner or later;

The reason that America was set up was that she might be different from all the nations of the world in this: that the strong could not put the weak to the wall, that the strong could not prevent the weak from entering the race.

America stands for opportunity. America stands for a free field and no favor. America stands for a government responsive to the interests of all.

And until America recovers those ideals in practice, she will not have the right to hold her head high again amidst the nations as she used to hold it.

One of the worst features of the boss system is this fact, that it works secretly.

I would a great deal rather live under a king whom I should at least know, than under a boss whom I don’t know.

A boss is a much more formidable master than a king, because a king is an obvious master, whereas the hands of the boss are always where you least expect them to be.

Why do we continue to permit these things? Isn’t it about time that we grew up and took charge of our own affairs?

I am tired of being under age in politics.

I don’t want to be associated with anybody except those who are politically over twenty-one. I don’t wish to sit down and let any man take care of me without my having at least a voice in it;

that the people are too busy or too lazy to bother about voting at primary elections? True, sometimes the people of a state or a community do let a direct primary go by without asserting their authority as against the bosses.

The electorate of the United States is occasionally like the god Baal: it is sometimes on a journey or it is sometimes asleep; but when it does awake, it does not resemble the god Baal in the slightest degree.

It is a great self-possessed power which effectually takes control of its own affairs. I am willing to wait.

I have seen some thoughtful men discuss that with a sort of shiver, as if to disturb the original constitution of the United States Senate was to do something touched with impiety, touched with irreverence for the Constitution itself.

But the first thing necessary to reverence for the United States Senate is respect for United States Senators.

I am not one of those who condemn the United States Senate as a body;

Then there was another thing that we modestly desired: We wanted fair elections; we did not want candidates to buy themselves into office. That seemed reasonable.

So we adopted a law, unique in one particular, namely: that if you bought an office, you didn’t get it.

I admit that that is contrary to all commercial principles, but I think it is pretty good political doctrine.

… man in jail for buying an office, but it is very much better, besides putting him in jail, to show him that if he has paid out a single dollar for that office, he does not get it, though a huge majority voted for him.

We reversed the laws of trade; when you buy something in politics in New Jersey, you do not get it.

It seemed to us that that was the best way to discourage improper political argument. If your money does not produce the goods, then you are not tempted to spend your money.

So I say, there is nothing very difficult about resuming our own government. There is nothing to appall us when we make up our minds to set about the task.

“The way to resume is to resume,”

said Horace Greeley, once, when the country was frightened at a prospect which turned out to be not in the least frightful; it was at the moment of the resumption of specie payments for Treasury notes.

You only need about twenty-four men to do the trick. These men are impostors. They are powerful only in proportion as we are susceptible to absurd fear of them.

Their capital is our ignorance and our credulity.

Today we are seeing something that some of us have waited all of our lives to see. We are witnessing a rising of the country. We are seeing a whole people stand up and decline any longer to be imposed upon.

… things than are made elsewhere in the world, that they can sell them cheaper in foreign markets than they are sold in these very markets of domestic manufacture, are afraid—afraid to venture out into the great world on their own merits and their own skill.

Think of it, a nation full of genius and yet paralyzed by timidity!

The timidity of the business men of America is to me nothing less than amazing. They are tied to the apron strings of the government at Washington. They go about to seek favors. They say:

What we propose, therefore, in this program of freedom, is a program of general advantage. Almost every monopoly that has resisted dissolution has resisted the real interests of its own stockholders.

Monopoly always checks development, weighs down natural prosperity, pulls against natural advance.

Take but such an everyday thing as a useful invention and the putting of it at the service of men. You know how prolific the American mind has been in invention;

Wherever there is monopoly, not only is there no incentive to improve, but, improvement being costly in that it “scraps” old machinery and destroys the value of old products, there is a positive motive against improvement.

The instinct of monopoly is against novelty, the tendency of monopoly is to keep in use the old thing, made in the old way

; its disposition is to “standardize” everything.

Standardization may be all very well—but suppose everything had been standardized thirty years ago—we should still be writing by hand, by gaslight, we should be without the inestimable aid of the telephone (sometimes, I admit, it is a nuisance), without the automobile, without wireless telegraphy.

Personally, I could have managed to plod along without the aeroplane, and I could have been happy even without moving-pictures.

Of course, I am not saying that all invention has been stopped by the growth of trusts, but I think it is perfectly clear that invention in many fields has been discouraged, that inventors have been prevented from reaping the full fruits of their ingenuity …

The trouble about conservation is that the government of the United States hasn’t any policy at present. It is simply marking time. It is simply standing still.

Reservation is not conservation.

Simply to say, “We are not going to do anything about the forests,” when the country needs to use the forests, is not a practicable program at all.

The hope and elasticity of the race must be preserved; men must be preserved according to their individual needs, and not according to the programs of industry merely.

What is the use of having industry, if we perish in producing it?

If we die in trying to feed ourselves, why should we eat? If we die trying to get a foothold in the crowd, why not let the crowd trample us sooner and be done with it?

What I am interested in is having the government of the United States more concerned about human rights than about property rights.

Property is an instrument of humanity; humanity isn’t an instrument of property.

And yet when you see some men riding their great industries as if they were driving a car of juggernaut, not looking to see what multitudes prostrate themselves before the car and lose their lives in the crushing effect of their industry, you wonder how …

Europe had either to face about or lack any outlet for her energies; the unknown sea at the west at last was ventured upon, and the earth learned that it was twice as big as it had thought.

Columbus did not find, as he had expected, the civilization of Cathay; he found an empty continent.

In that part of the world, upon that newfound half of the globe, mankind, late in its history, was thus afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization; here it was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment.

The individual is dizzily swept about in a thousand new whirlpools of activities.

Tyranny has become more subtle, and has learned to wear the guise of mere industry, and even of benevolence.

Freedom has become a somewhat different matter. It cannot—eternal principle that it is—it cannot have altered, yet it shows itself in new aspects. Perhaps it is only revealing its deeper meaning.

She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.

Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.

Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate today than ever before.