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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.

Lincoln Steffens

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Lincoln Steffens
Age: 70 †
Born: 1866
Born: April 6
Died: 1936
Died: August 9
Autobiographer
Journalist
San Francisco County
California
Lincoln Austin Steffens
Habit
Conditions
Grew
Fitted
Understand
Russian
Government
Habits
People
Soviet
Psychology
Condition

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I hunted far enough to suspect that the Fathers of the Republic who wrote our Sacred Constitution of the United States not only did not, but did not want to, establish a democratic government.
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Revolt is not reform, and one revolutionary administration is not good government.
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My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion.
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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.
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It is our knowledge - the things we are sure of - that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.
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The spirit of graft and of lawlessness is the American spirit.
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So youve been over into Russia? said Bernard Baruch, and I answered very literally, I have been over into the future and it works.
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It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done not often.
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It is privilege that causes evil in the world, not wickedness, and not men.
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If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation.
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I let my boy go and do and say pretty much as he likes, as, and perhaps because, my father kept no string on me.
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I never heard a Christian sermon preached in a church.
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In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul.
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One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.
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My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.
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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.
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My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being.
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I have been contending all my life, and always with God.
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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.
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Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure.
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