Top 35 John Jay Chapman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, – to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.”

— John Jay Chapman

2. “All progress is experimental.”

— John Jay Chapman

3. “Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous.”

— John Jay Chapman

4. “The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.”

— John Jay Chapman

5. “Good government is the outcome of private virtue.”

— John Jay Chapman

6. “Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own.”

— John Jay Chapman

7. “People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold.”

— John Jay Chapman

8. “Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of a generous emotion.”

— John Jay Chapman

9. “A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.”

— John Jay Chapman

10. “Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.”

— John Jay Chapman

11. “Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.”

— John Jay Chapman

12. “Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.”

— John Jay Chapman

13. “The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.”

— John Jay Chapman

14. “Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same – hardihood. Give them raw truth.”

— John Jay Chapman

15. “The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy.”

— John Jay Chapman

16. “It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.”

— John Jay Chapman

17. “People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this; that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.”

— John Jay Chapman

18. “If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.”

— John Jay Chapman

19. “Too much agreement kills the chat.”

— John Jay Chapman

20. “So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid upon all subjects.”

— John Jay Chapman

21. “The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.”

— John Jay Chapman

22. “The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.”

— John Jay Chapman

23. “The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.”

— John Jay Chapman

24. “There are lots of people who cannot think seriously without injuring their minds.”

— John Jay Chapman

25. “You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.”

— John Jay Chapman

26. “The world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. You love them because you say, These things were not made, they were seen.”

— John Jay Chapman

27. “The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.”

— John Jay Chapman

28. “A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.”

— John Jay Chapman

29. “When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise.”

— John Jay Chapman

30. “Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.”

— John Jay Chapman

31. “A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.”

— John Jay Chapman

32. “A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair – why, this is the desideratum of mankind.”

— John Jay Chapman

33. “The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think.”

— John Jay Chapman

34. “It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.”

— John Jay Chapman

35. “There are plenty of people to whom the crucial problem of their lives never get presented in terms that they can understand.”

— John Jay Chapman

36. “Wherever you see a man who gives someone else’s corruption, someone else’s prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us.”

— John Jay Chapman

37. “I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.”

— John Jay Chapman