William Allen White > Quotes

“I am not afraid of tomorrow
for I have seen yesterday
and I love today”
― William Allen White

“If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own … how much kinder, how much gentler he would be.”
― William Allen White

“Dip your pen into your arteries and write.”
― William Allen White

“When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas”
― William Allen White

“Every great movement needs an agitator. Every leader of spiritual ideals need a John the Baptist.”
― William Allen White

“Incidentally the squires scrambled in Boston for the state funds which might be distributed among their banks as patronage. They asked little else. Postmasters and the court house officials were of the lower orders. But the squires supported them and required a sort of political military service from them. Thus the squirearchy reigned feudally in a capitalistic democracy”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Thin soil like Massachusetts highly cultivated” was the estimate of Congressman Lodge made by Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the national House of Representatives.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“When they appeared with bills in legislative committees where he met them, he treated the sponsors of the reform measure with a sort of embalmed courtesy, heard them, promised nothing. If the reformers really controlled votes he surprised them by helping their measures. He was educating himself politically in those senatorial years. “Education,” he wrote in one of his pat phrases, “after all is the process by which each individual creates his own universe and determines its dimensions.”{”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Those were the days when it was proper, even necessary for Republicans in the most nonpartisan gatherings of the North to speak of the participation “of this State in the War of the Rebellion.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Three years after he came to town, he was elected one of the members of the common council of the town of Northampton, from Ward Two. It was in that year that the Northampton City Council was faced with the first serious traffic problem that had come up in a hundred years. Fred Jager brought an automobile to town. It was called a Locomobile. It went chugging up and down the streets and scared the horses. The Council resolved that something ought to be done.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“And what with the mystery of death and bereavement and the mysticism of the Bible, with all the beauty of the mountains and their ever-changing moods, naturally this New England child became set in his ways, a Yankee mystic to the end.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Luck often is a lazy man’s explanation for the result of intelligent diligence.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Too often privilege in Massachusetts was bolstered by class-conscious arrogance tempered only when necessary by corruption. Coolidge was not corrupt. His personal ideals were high. But he was serene in the presence of this corruptible body in Boston even though he put on the incorruptible—a quickening spirit. He played a clean game with the run of the dirty cards!”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“My old friends in the House{91} were gone. The Western Massachusetts Club, that had its headquarters in the Adams House where most of us lived that came from beyond the Connecticut, was inactive. The committees I had, except the chairmanship of agriculture, did not interest me greatly, and to crown my discontent the Democratic governor sent in a veto which the senate sustained, to a bill authorizing the New Haven Railroad to construct a trolley system in western Massachusetts.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“For some reason, the former President failed to rise to the response of the audience to his unconscious humor. He began a phrase modestly,
"When I was in Washington," being a euphemism for
"When I was President" and the audience burst into laughter. Afterwards, he said sadly to Mrs. Coolidge:
"They seemed to be in a strange mood. I never spoke to an audience which laughed before.""
Yet a few weeks later when an enthusiastic woman Republican gurgled at him:
"Oh, Mr. Coolidge, I enjoyed your speech so much that I stood up during the whole speech. I couldn't get a seat."
Quipped Coolidge: "So did I!”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Fishing for accessories before the fact or deed, the Professor examined Calvin who was obviously sweetly sleeping in his dormitory bed far from suspicion. “But Calvin, you must have heard the noise when the stove rolled down the stairs?” Calvin admitted it. “Then why didn’t you do something, give the alarm?” “It wa’n’t my stove!” quoth the boy who was father of the man. Whenever he faced temptation to “rise and spread the alarm” he always remembered that “it wa’n’t” his “stove.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Crane, succeeding Senator Hoar in the Senate, would be congenitally the foe of Lodge. Lodge was of the Brahmin caste in Massachusetts, and Harvardian of the deepest die, a Cabot by inheritance who liked to be known as the scholar in politics; the author of several books, the friend of the literati in America and England, a travelled man, meticulous of dress, of deportment and of speech, intellectually mediocre, emotional, highly charged but heavily suppressed, capable of hatreds and friendly loyalties that were deeply affectionate”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“As it was, getting out of the car that night Coolidge said to Jager: “It’s wonderful to ride in a horseless wagon.” Then a pause: “But it won’t amount to much!”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Arthur P. Russell, who was vice president of the New Haven Railroad, and Charles Hiller Innes, commonly accredited as the Republican boss of Boston, and of course called “Charlie,” were fairly close to the Northampton senator, and, according to the tradition of the day,{98} in a pinch Innes could deliver Coolidge’s vote. Innes testified in 1919 that he received forty thousand dollars in three years from the New Haven Railroad.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Coolidge declared later that no one knew that McCall had told him to run and “some supposed I would run against him.” But Coolidge was not of that stripe.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“In those years from 1893 to 1896, Congress was thrown into turmoil by the demand for “the free coinage of silver at sixteen to one” when the commercial ratio was about thirty to one.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“It is interesting to note that Senator Lodge, Crane’s rival, was invincible in Essex County, the most northeasterly in the state, and Senator Crane was moated in Berkshire, the most southwesterly. Harvard and the Catholics and an urban civilization dominated the seaboard. A sophisticated Congregational industrialism—farms, fields, and workshops—gave color to the Republican cast of thought of western Massachusetts.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“He reasoned because human consciousness is a part of universal life, that the part may not be greater than the whole. Therefore he concluded that the purposive force which directs life, which guides the stars in their courses and spurs and speeds the energies inside the atom, is of itself a consciousness.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Outside that periphery in the middle eighties, America was boiling her melting pot. The exploited millions of Europe were pouring into the United States, splashing over the rim of the cauldron into economic oppression—if not social—as harsh and cruel as that they left in Europe save for this: the opportunity to rise, to climb out of the hell into which they were dumped.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“Coolidge, in those days and always, distrusted reformers.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“I have never seen a public man who more quickly, shrewdly, efficiently got through a pile of Sunday newspapers than Calvin Coolidge. I was interested in his skill. It revealed a sharp mind, a lively set of brains. He rose abruptly after his morning stint of reading, walked out of the smoking-room without saying a word; indeed he had passed less than a dozen syllables during the hour and a half while we sat watching him above the rims of our papers.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“His fairy godfather in the legislature was Senator Murray Crane. Few persons influenced Coolidge’s life more than Crane; his father, and Dwight Morrow perhaps, then Crane. So we must pause here a moment and consider Winthrop Murray Crane, twenty years older than Calvin Coolidge, a papermaker, who having been dead a decade and a half as these lines are penned Crane may well be called a statesman.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“President Wilson had made his unfortunate plea for Democratic support which antagonized the West but was not a sufficient handicap to defeat David I. Walsh, the Democratic leader, who overcame Senator Weeks.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“First of all we must remember that Theodore Roosevelt was young, a President in his early forties. His appeal was directly to young Republicans. He awakened hope in the colleges. It was not strange that Calvin Coolidge heard him.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“He writes of the Garman ethics that “there is a standard of righteousness that might does not make right, that the end does not justify the means, and that expediency as a working principle is bound to fail. The only hope of perfecting human relationships is in accordance with the law of service under which men are not so solicitous about what they shall get as they are about what they shall give.”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge