Top 40 Lincoln Steffens Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.”

— Lincoln Steffens

2. “I have seen the future, and it works.”

— Lincoln Steffens

3. “Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over.”

— Lincoln Steffens

4. “It is our knowledge – the things we are sure of – that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.”

— Lincoln Steffens

5. “In all cities, the better classes – the business men – are the sources of corruption, but they are so rarely pursued and caught that we do not fully realize whence the trouble comes.”

— Lincoln Steffens

6. “Chicago will give you a chance. The sporting spirit is the spirit of Chicago.”

— Lincoln Steffens

7. “The doctrine of Jesus is the most revolutionary propaganda that I have ever encountered.”

— Lincoln Steffens

8. “It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done; not often.”

— Lincoln Steffens

9. “The politer the society, the greater the lies it requires.”

— Lincoln Steffens

10. “Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story.”

— Lincoln Steffens

11. “The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.”

— Lincoln Steffens

12. “You can’t control a young horse unless you control yourself.”

— Lincoln Steffens

13. “Whenever anything extraordinary is done in American municipal politics, whether for good or for evil, you can trace it almost invariably to one man. The people do not do it. Neither do the ‘gangs,’ ‘combines,’ or political parties.”

— Lincoln Steffens

14. “The spirit of graft and of lawlessness is the American spirit.”

— Lincoln Steffens

15. “You ask men in office to be honest; I ask them to serve the public.”

— Lincoln Steffens

16. “Care like hell! Sit around the bars and drink, and pose, and pretend, all you want to, but in reality, deep down underneath, care like hell.”

— Lincoln Steffens

17. “We know that there is no absolute knowledge, that there are only theories; but we forget this. The better educated we are, the harder we believe in axioms.”

— Lincoln Steffens

18. “The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle.”

— Lincoln Steffens

19. “Somebody must take a chance. There are monkeys who became men, and the monkeys who didn’t are still jumping around in trees making faces at the monkeys who did.”

— Lincoln Steffens

20. “The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.”

— Lincoln Steffens

21. “My father, the practical joker, did not care for practical jokes on himself; he did not encourage the practice in me.”

— Lincoln Steffens

22. “The only thing worth having in an earthly existence is a sense of humor.”

— Lincoln Steffens

23. “Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.”

— Lincoln Steffens

24. “If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation.”

— Lincoln Steffens

25. “So youve been over into Russia? said Bernard Baruch, and I answered very literally, I have been over into the future and it works.”

— Lincoln Steffens

26. “I have been contending all my life, and always with God.”

— Lincoln Steffens

27. “It is privilege that causes evil in the world, not wickedness, and not men.”

— Lincoln Steffens

28. “My summary of all our experiences was that it showed that heaven and hell are one place, and we all go there. To those who are prepared, it is heaven; to those who are not fit and ready, it is hell.”

— Lincoln Steffens

29. “My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion.”

— Lincoln Steffens

30. “First in violence, deepest in dirt, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a – village, the “tough” among cities, a spectacle for the nation.”

— Lincoln Steffens

31. “If my father could watch my son for a while, he might realize his own immortality.”

— Lincoln Steffens

32. “I let my boy go and do and say pretty much as he likes, as, and perhaps because, my father kept no string on me.”

— Lincoln Steffens

33. “Why is it that the less intelligence people have, the more spiritual they are? They seem to fill all the vacant, ignorant spaces in their heads with soul. Which explains how it is that the less knowledge they have, the more religion.”

— Lincoln Steffens

34. “I hunted far enough to suspect that the Fathers of the Republic who wrote our Sacred Constitution of the United States not only did not, but did not want to, establish a democratic government.”

— Lincoln Steffens

35. “My father would invite me sweetly to come and sit on a stool at his feet, and, as I let myself trustingly down, he would gently kick the seat from under me – and laugh.”

— Lincoln Steffens

36. “My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being.”

— Lincoln Steffens

37. “In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul.”

— Lincoln Steffens

38. “I am really puzzled to understand myself.”

— Lincoln Steffens

39. “I never heard a Christian sermon preached in a church.”

— Lincoln Steffens

40. “Revolt is not reform, and one revolutionary administration is not good government.”

— Lincoln Steffens

41. “My mother would thump me sharply on the head with a thimble or a spoon if I became too noisy with the whistle when I was playing I was a steamboat captain. She had no sense of the dignity of command.”

— Lincoln Steffens

42. “The Soviet government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it.”

— Lincoln Steffens

43. “We need some great failures. Especially we ever-successful Americans – conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures.”

— Lincoln Steffens

44. “The unknown is the province of the student; it is the field for his lifes adventure, and it is a wide field full of beckonings.”

— Lincoln Steffens

45. “Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure.”

— Lincoln Steffens

46. “One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive ‘talking to’ was all I got.”

— Lincoln Steffens

47. “My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.”

— Lincoln Steffens

48. “My father made with me one serious mistake which I see parents about me making. He got himself somehow into the awkward position of an authority; I thought he knew and was right on everything – for a while.”

— Lincoln Steffens