Permanent selections

The Enduring Commonplace Book


A curated and gradually expanding collection of words worth returning to—quotations that illuminate law, power, democracy, citizenship, and the responsibilities of self-government.

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Enduring selections

Permanent selection

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (1809), Part II, Chapter V

Permanent selection

“One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests.”

Theodore Roosevelt, Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910. Memorial Edition XIX, 28; National Edition XVII, 21.

Permanent selection

“If you for a generation permit big corporations to purchase favors to which they are not entitled you will breed up a race of public men and business men who accept that condition of things as normal. And then, my friends, when you finally wake up, I wish you would remember that, great though their blame may be, your blame is even greater for having permitted such a condition of things to arise. When the awakening comes, you will undoubtedly have to change the machinery of the law in order to meet the conditions that have become so bad.”

Theodore Roosevelt, Pacific Theological Seminary, spring 1911. Memorial Edition XV, 626; National Edition XIII, 659.