Top 34 Quotes by Irving Babbitt

Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.

We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.

The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.