All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much mo...re intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumbler and begin to poke around for rumours of another Messiah.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisanc...e. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the... consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both of us felt more anxiety about the South--about the colored people especially--than about anything else sinister in the result.... My hope of a sound currency will somehow be realized; civil service reform will be delayed; but the great injury is in the South. There the Amendments will be nullified, disorder will continue, prosperity to both whites and colored people will be pushed off for years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I spent my life mixin' with your breed, and I don't like it. Get me. You can hide behind a lot of red tape, crooked lawyers and po...liticians with the gimmes, writs of habeas corpus, witnesses that don't remember overnight, but we'll get through to you, just like we got all the rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not think a revival of business will be greatly postponed by [Samuel J.] Tilden's election. Business prosperity does not, in ...my judgment, depend on government so much as men commonly think.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Southern States are uneasy at the prospect of [Abraham] Lincoln's election today. The ultra South threatens disunion, and it n...ow looks as if South Carolina and possibly two or three others would go out of the Union. Will they? And if so, what is to be the result? Will other slave States gradually be drawn after them, or will the conservative States draw back into the Union or hold in the Union the ultra States? I think the latter. But at all events, I feel as if the time had come to test this question. If the threats are meant, then it is time the Union was dissolved or the traitors crushed out. I hope Lincoln goes in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine tha...t our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Predictions usually deal with events--who will win an election, whether or not a country will go to war, the specification of a ne...w invention; they center on decisions. Yet such predictions, while possible, cannot be formalized, i.e. made subject to rules. The prediction of events is inherently difficult. Events are the intersect of social vectors (interests, forces, pressures, and the like). While one can to some extent assess the strength of these vectors individually, one would need a "social physics" to predict the exact crosspoints where decisions and forces combine.... Forecasting is possible where there are regularities and recurrences of phenomena (these are rare), of where there are persisting trends whose direction, if not exact trajectory, can be plotted with statistical time-series or be formulated as historical tendencies. Necessarily, therefore, one deals with probabili ties and an array of possible projections. But the limitations of forecasting are also evident. The further one reaches ahead in time with a set of forecasts, the greater the margin for error, since the fan of the projections widens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »