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Robert M. La Follette Sr. Quotes
1855–1925 United States
Robert Marion "Fighting Bob" La Follette Sr. (June 14, 1855 - June 18, 1925) was an American Republican (and later a Progressive) politician. He served as a member of the U.S.
Also known as: Robert M. La Follette, Robert M. La Follette Sr
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Wealth has never yet sacrificed itself on the altar of patriotism.
Publicity, discussion, and agitation are necessary to accomplish any work of lasting benefit.
Mere passive citizenship is not enough. Men must be aggressive for what is right if government is to be saved from those who are aggressive for what is wrong.
The individual is fast disappearing as a business factor and in his stead is this new device, the modern corporation.
The real cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.
I shall support the President in the measures he proposes when I believe them to be right. I shall oppose measures proposed by the President when I believe them to be wrong.
To control the American market is to own America.
Fooling the People As A Fine Art (1918)
We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated.
To befool and mislead the people, to falsify public opinion, is to pervert and destroy a republican form of government.
Fooling the People As A Fine Art (1918)
I have become more and more impressed with the deep underlying singleness of the issue. It is not the tariff or conservation or the currency. It is not the trusts. The supreme issue, involving all the others, is the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many.
The ill-gotten surplus capital acquired by exploiting the resources and the people of our country begets the imperialism which hunts down and exploits the natural resources and the people of foreign countries, erects huge armaments for the protection of its investments, breeds international strife in the markets of the world, and inevitably leads to war.
The universal conviction of those who yet believe in the rights of the people is that the first step toward the prevention of war and the establishment of peace, permanent peace, is to give the people who must bear the brunt of war's awful burden more to say about it.
Free Speech in Wartime (1917)
The mobbing of harmless, helpless Negroes in the capital of this country is the nation's everlasting shame. The responsibility for starting the riots, which ruled Washington for days, rests upon disorderly lawless whites. Peaceable, unoffending colored men and boys were beaten up and murdered by brutes who boast of our white civilization.
There is another plane of thought into which some have entered. It holds up a vision of a society redeemed by true democracy. It believes in a time when monopoly shall be no more, and labor and capital, no longer at war, shall cooperate to the wiping out of involuntary and undeserved poverty in an era of industrial equality and social peace.
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