Horace Greeley

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

Horace Greeley (February 3, 1811 – November 29, 1872) was an American editor of a leading newspaper, New York Tribune, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer and a politician.

Sourced

• The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.
  • The American Conflict, A History of the Great Rebellion (1864).

• The masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has so long divided them.
  • Acceptance of Liberal Republican nomination as President (May 29, 1872).

• The Republic needed to be passed through chastening, purifying fires of adversity and suffering: so these came and did their work and the verdure of a new national life springs greenly, luxuriantly, from their ashes.
  • Greeley on Lincoln, ed. Joel Benton, pp. 78–79 (1893).

• If any young man is about to commence the world, we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West.
  • New Yorker, Aug. 25, 1838; often paraphrased as "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country"
  • Sometimes misattributed to John L. Soule

Attributed

• There aren't half enough of them going there as it is.
  • Reply to a missionary who asked Greeley for a subscription to "help keep people from going to hell".
  • Quoted by Albert Jay Nock, Grab-bag Education, The Book of Journeyman (1930).

Unsourced

• A widow of doubtful age will marry almost any sort of a white man.
  • Letter to Dr. Rufus Wilmot Griswold.

• I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers; what I said was that all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

• If Uncle Sam should ever sell that tract for one cent per acre, he will swindle the purchaser outrageously.
  • About land in Utah