Joel Benton Quotes

If it is to have the fat meat in its pudding, on what principle can it free itself from responsibility for the lean?

The only "protection" they ever were in need of is protection from dogs and tariff-mongers.

The man who burned up his barn filled with grain to destroy a hornets' nest is not alone in the world. He now has a cult and a body of disciples.

Winged soul of beauty, tropic in desire,
Thy love seems alien in our northern zone;
Thou giv'st to our green lands a burst of fire
And callest back the fables we disown.
The hot equator thou mightst well inspire,
Or stand above some Eastern monarch’s throne.

Looking along the horizon's endless line,
Man seems a pigmy in these realms of space; ...
Here are soft grasses, flowers of tender hue,
Palimpsests of the old and coming race.

Nor moves his pen our heedless nation now,
Which, sworn to justice, stirred the people so.
In some far world his much-loved face must glow
With rapture still. This breeze once fanned his brow.
This is the peaceful Mecca all men know!

Pixie, kobold, elf, and sprite
All are on their rounds to-night,—
In the wan moon's silver ray
Thrives their helter-skelter play.

The effort to make things equal is a problem too great for any but angels and seraphs to deal with. No merely human device can touch it without breaking or deranging the mainspring of civilization.

Nothing was ever truer...than the statement, "The poor you have always with you."

A ball of fire shoots through the tamarack
In scarlet splendor, on voluptuous wings;
Delirious joy the pyrotechnist brings,
Who marks for us high summer's almanac.
How instantly the red-coat hurtles back!

They will see a generation here and now that is trying to lift itself over the fence by standing in a corn-basket and pulling upward on the handles.

As we hold in derision now the discovery of the philosopher's stone and perpetual motion, so future generations will look upon this fetich of our time, and not without unspeakable amazement.

Sea-like in billowy distance, far away
The half-broke prairies stretch on every hand;
How wide the circuit of their summer day—
What measureless acres of primeval land,
Treeless and birdless, by no eyesight spanned!

The history of land-ownership ... is as strikingly a history of losses as it is of profits. We see the successes, as we see the ships which float on the ocean, while the unnumbered wrecks in both cases are out of thought and beyond vision.

For the people to buy themselves out, would be the only honest way of transfer; but this would be like a man standing in a corn-basket and trying to lift himself by its handles over the fence.