Walter McCarthy

“(F)or no word that has been uttered for the purpose of making man the master of his own fate has been spoken in vain.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon, Van Loon's Lives

“Half a century of digging among the ruins of the past had made me painfully familiar with the feet of clay which were buried deeply in the sands of time and which only too often supported the magnificent superstructure of some of the statues erected to our departed gods and half-gods. But, on the other hand, where would we have been—yes, where would we be today—unless occasionally there had been feet of granite, willing and able to carry their owners into the realm of the unknown and find new roads toward progress? The answer was—nowhere at all. We needed those voortrekkers, as our South African cousins used to call them. We needed a few stout hearts to do the pioneering. Without those men and women who trekked ahead of the rest of the crowd and either found new grazing fields or died in the attempt, no one of us would ever have gotten very far. We would have been obliged to stick to the swampy coastal regions, where we had lived and died until then, since the beginning of time, and we would never have known what lay hidden beyond the distant mountain ranges.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon, Van Loon's Lives

“The original mistake, which was responsible for all this misery, was committed when our scientists began to create a new world of steel and iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years behind the small group of courageous leaders.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind

“But in practical politics, it does not matter what is true, but everything depends upon what the people believe to be true.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon