Lincoln Steffens

If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply any demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The longer I live, the more I feel that the individual is not so much to blame - not even the worst individuals, not even the 'best' citizens - as the system of corruption which has grown up about us, and which rewards an honest man with a mere living and a crook with all the magnificence of our magnificent modern life.

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.