Stephen Vincent Benet Quotes

You can't do business with a man who doesn't know the meaning of a contract. You can't do business with a firm who swears they'll do one thing one day and does just the opposite the next. You can't do business with a company who takes your goods on a cash basis and then pays you off in bum harmonicas.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy - the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

You call my candidate a horse thief, and I call yours a lunatic, and we both of us know it's just till election day. It's an American custom, like eating corn on the cob. And, afterwards, we settle down quite peaceably and agree we've got a pretty good country - until next election.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

There are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Let each one of us say, 'I am an American. I intend to stay an American. I will do my best to wipe from my heart hate, rancor and political prejudice. I will sustain my government. And, through good days or bad, I will try to serve my country.'

- Stephen Vincent Benet

It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard - very hard - to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a cause and to have lost. Most of all, it is hard to put aside personal prejudices. And yet we must put these things aside.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Dreaming men are haunted men.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

We can no longer take our own way of life for granted - we know that it may be challenged. And we know this, too - and know it ever more deeply - we know that freedom and democracy are not just big words mouthed by orators but the rain and the wind and the sun, the air and the light by which we breathe and live.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Let us be bold enough and free enough to follow the great examples - the men of good will and honor who put aside little ways and petty hatreds to build the American dream.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain, and eyes like burning antracite - that was Dan'l Webster in his prime.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

You work hard, and you'll rise. But, if you've got any foolish notions, just knock them on the head and forget them.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

It is forbidden to go east, but I have gone, forbidden to go on the great river, but I am there. Open your hearts, you spirits, and hear my song.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Treat a boy like a fool and he'll act like a fool, I say, but there's some folks need convincing.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

You can't depend on the kind of folks people think they are - you've got to go by what they do. And I wouldn't give much for a man that some folks hadn't thought was a fool, in his time.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

We cannot be a house divided - divided in will, divided in interest, divided in soul. We cannot be a house divided and live.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth.

- Stephen Vincent Benet