When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River.... That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the ha...mpered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two thirds of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the truth regardless of his parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we "modify" before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be ...organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in t...he machinery of civilised life? The world seems to me to do much of its toil for that which is not in any sense bread. Again, does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don't want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim--for self-developm...ent, or the discovery of cosmic truths--when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always rebelled against the unadorned, the unbefitting, the unawakened, the unresisting, the undesirable, the unplanned, th...e unshapely, the uncommitted, the unattempted--all leading to the unintended. I believe in the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable--in other words, in an art of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel more charity for a Mormon who has been taught from his birth that it is not only his right but his duty to God to enter int...o plural marriages, and that the man who has the greatest number of wives stands highest in God's favor, than I do for the man who has been taught from his cradle that the unpardonable sin is the desecration of womanhood; whose religious training and the moral code of civilization in which he is reared make it a crime to violate the Seventh Commandment and the established law of monogamy. Yet, judging from the testimony we see all about us--our ... lying-in and foundling hospitals and our fallen womanhood--the married or single man who lives a pure life is rare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The anti-suffragist talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is a lot of cant. I have no patience with it. These st...orms beat on woman just as fiercely as they do on man, and she is not trained to defend herself against them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have known nothing the last thirty years save the struggle for human rights on this continent. If it had been a class of men who... were disfranchised and denied their legal rights, I believe I should have devoted my life precisely as I have done in behalf of my own sex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »