It is a rather pitiful fact that it became necessary to have laws to do what the rational conscience had failed to do. A certain advantage can be taken at a time when everyone is afraid of being misjudged. Like the undertaker’s bill, such things are often brought forward at a time when everyone feels that he must swallow the dose and ask no questions. A wrong philosophy can lead a nation to its ruin within the space of a few generations. A worthy one can as promptly and definitely determine a nation’s progress and happiness.---The thinkers of a nation sow the seeds. The people sooner or later harvest the fruit. The lack of idealism is the most expensive thing the people of any city can have on their hands.---If you want thieves, hoodlums, and libertines, create a low standard of ideals in the community, and you will get them. Only the constructive thinker makes the great general, the great leader, or the great engineer. It is the unnecessary that changes bare existence into throbbing and purposeful life. We need to remember that it is the will uncompelled that tames the wilderness, that it is the hand unconstrained that reclaims the desert, and that it is the kindness born of spontaneous impulse which brings into life the uplifting and the helpful. We do not get at the danger of any evil by comparing one evil with another. The question for a vigorous Nation in a trying time is not as to what is the harm in a thing but as to what is the good. A thought or a feeling of aspiration, however great or strong, is not meant to be an end within itself. It is a means to the end of its actual realization in action and accomplishment. No less important than the things which we have been given are the things from which we have been saved. Great movements must always be fathered by self-sacrificing spirits before they are finally taken upon the hearts of the people. There is only one way to change the past, and that is to change it before it becomes the past. Make this day what you desire.... It must dwell in your thoughts forever as a piercing thorn or a blooming flower. Your hand is on its gate for the last time. ...we must recognize the common human tendency to glorify the past to the disadvantage of the present.---One may read something of this sort in the literature of ancient as well as modern ages. Yet the progress of the world has gone right on. ...the religious consciousness is best developed in the solitudes. Any reform is rapid when men once get to thinking. The case is hopeless so long as apathy and lethargy prevail. Nothing is to be gained by compromising with the mind of the flesh, which is death. Our place as a nation is largely the result of this union of hope and thing, this combination of dream and realization, this blending of the ideal and the practical. Man is he who thinks, and the most successful man is he who thinks most promptly and accurately. Community/Relationship