John Jay Chapman

Quotes:

"The men and woman who make the best boon companions seem to have given up hope of doing something else...some defect of talent or opportunity has cut them off from their pet ambition and has thus left them with leisure to take an interest in their lives of others. Your ambition may be, it makes him keep his thoughts at home. But the heartbroken people -- if I may use the word in a mild, benevolent sense -- the people whose wills are subdued to fate, give us consolation, recognition, and welcome."

"You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it."

"Good government is the outcome of private virtue."

"I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns."

"A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful."

"The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind."

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John Jay Chapman (1862–1933) was an American author.

Biography

He was born in New York City. His father, Henry Grafton Chapman, was a broker who eventually became president of the New York Stock Exchange. He was educated at Harvard, was admitted to the bar in 1888, and practiced law until 1898. Meanwhile he had attracted attention as an essayist of unusual merit. His work is marked by originality and felicity of expression, and in the opinion of many critics has placed him in the front rank of the American essayists of his day.

He is the subject of an interesting biographical and critical essay by Edmund Wilson in The Triple Thinkers which recounts the reasons behind Chapman's deliberately burning off his own left hand.

Bibliography

• Emerson and Other Essays (1898)
• Causes and Consequences (1898)
• Practical Agitation (1900)
• Four Plays for Children (1908)
• The Maid's Forgiveness (1908)
• A Message from Bologna (1909)
• Benedict Arnold: A Play for a Greek Theatre (1911)
• Learning and Other Essays (1911)
• William Lloyd Garrison (1913)
• Homeric Scenes (verse, 1914)
• Memories and Milestones (1915)
• Deutschland über Alles (1915)
• Notes on Religion (1915)
• Greek Genius and Other Essays (1915)
• The Letters of Victor Chapman, with Memoirs (1917)
• Songs and Poems (1919)
• William Lloyd Garrison (second edition, revised and enlarged, 1921)
• Glance toward Shakespeare (1922)
• Unbought Spirit : A John Jay Chapman Reader, by John Jay Chapman; Richard Stone (Editor) (Foreword by)Jacques Barzun (1998)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Jay Chapman

• Works by John Jay Chapman at Project Gutenberg
• Brief biography

• This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.

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