Top 40 Horace Greeley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.”

— Horace Greeley

Featured in: Character Quotes

2. “Common sense is very uncommon.”

— Horace Greeley

3. “Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.”

— Horace Greeley

4. “It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”

— Horace Greeley

Featured in: Reading Quotes

5. “Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.”

— Horace Greeley

6. “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

— Horace Greeley

7. “Bigotry is chronic dogmatism.”

— Horace Greeley

8. “We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.”

— Horace Greeley

9. “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

— Horace Greeley

10. “Duty and to-day are ours; results and futurity belong to God.”

— Horace Greeley

11. “The word “rest” is not in my vocabulary.”

— Horace Greeley

12. “We hope never to live in a Republic where one section is pinned to the other section by bayonets.”

— Horace Greeley

13. “Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter night.”

— Horace Greeley

14. “I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.”

— Horace Greeley

15. “The darkest hour in any man’s life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it.”

— Horace Greeley

16. “Our country right or wrong is an evil motto – what if your country be in the wrong? It will only compound her injury. I wish to serve the republic with an honest and fearless criticism.”

— Horace Greeley

17. “Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.”

— Horace Greeley

18. “There is no bigotry like that of “free thought” run to seed.”

— Horace Greeley

19. “If any young man is about to commence the world, we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West.”

— Horace Greeley

20. “The way we do things is to begin.”

— Horace Greeley

21. “Great grief makes sacred those upon whom its hand is laid. Joy may elevate, ambition glorify, but sorrow alone can consecrate.”

— Horace Greeley

22. “Printer’s ink is the great apostle of progress, whose pulpit is the press.”

— Horace Greeley

23. “No amount of preaching, exhortation, sympathy, benevolence, will render the condition of our working women what it should be, so long as the kitchen and needle are substantially their only resources.”

— Horace Greeley

24. “I am too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and am surrounded by horrors.”

— Horace Greeley

25. “While boasting of our noble deeds we’re careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.”

— Horace Greeley

26. “Answering a letter from a church asking what else they should try after having failed to raise enough money on bake sales, bazaars, suppers, etc. Why not try religion?”

— Horace Greeley

27. “The darkest day in a man’s career is that wherein he fancies there is some easier way of getting a dollar than by squarely earning it.”

— Horace Greeley

28. “The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.”

— Horace Greeley

29. “Talent without tact is only half talent.”

— Horace Greeley

30. “A widow of doubtful age will marry almost any sort of a white man.”

— Horace Greeley

31. “Stupidity has no friends, and wants none.”

— Horace Greeley

32. “Wisdom is never dear, provided the article be genuine.”

— Horace Greeley

33. “Men who have great riches and little culture rush into business, because they are weary of themselves.”

— Horace Greeley

34. “Nine-tenths of the world is entertained by scandalous rumors, which are never dissected until they are dead and, when pricked, collapse like an empty bladder.”

— Horace Greeley

35. “I do not regret having braved public opinion, when I knew it was wrong and was sure it would be merciless.”

— Horace Greeley

36. “Ease up, the play is over.”

— Horace Greeley

37. “The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.”

— Horace Greeley

38. “The Republic needed to be passed through chastening, purifying fires of adversity and suffering: so these came and did their work and the verdure of a new national life springs greenly, luxuriantly, from their ashes.”

— Horace Greeley

39. “You may be witty, but not satirical.”

— Horace Greeley

40. “There is no doctrine of Christianity but what has been anticipated by the Vedas.”

— Horace Greeley

41. “Money is more trouble than it is worth.”

— Horace Greeley

42. “Mr. Lincoln is already defeated. He cannot be re-elected.”

— Horace Greeley

43. “Ah! if the pulpit would practice what it preaches, then all would be well.”

— Horace Greeley

44. “The best use of a journal is to print the largest practical amount of important truth: truth which tends to make mankind wiser, and thus happier.”

— Horace Greeley

45. “He cannot wisely consent to spend the best years of his life in getting ready to live.”

— Horace Greeley