A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail… Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.
Category Archive: Charles Horton Cooley
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.
If we divine a discrepancy between a man’s words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.
To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to ‘Americanize’ him.