Quotes by Paul Harris

• Permanent superiority has never been realized by any nation in history. After the rise comes the fall.
• Personality has power to uplift, power to depress, power to curse, and power to bless.
• Segregation never brought anyone anything except trouble.
• Singing is not indulged in by Rotary clubs of some countries and all clubs are given full privilege to do as they please about including it in their programs.
• The higher the general average of intelligence, all things else being equal, the less the disposition to be meddlesome, critical, and overbearing.
• The lawlessness of frontier life in America has been pictured as a remarkable phenomenon. In reality, it was the natural consequence of indiscriminate mixing of volatile substances.
• The nation that is supreme above all others during one age, will be eclipsed by another in the next age.
• Much responsibility rests upon the shoulders of the song leader; it is not infrequently within his power to make or break a meeting.
• The very strength of a nation eventually proves to be its weakness.
• There is nothing in the genius of America more precious today than the spirit of religious and political tolerance in its application to our own people.
• To attempt to superimpose its views through the exercise of force, is seldom the part of intelligence; it is frequently the part of ignorance.
• While the struggle for religious liberty had proceeded without large-scale bloodshed in New England and elsewhere in the United States, the struggle for political liberty had not fared so well.
• Ignorance is a menace to peace.
• The less one knows, the more he thinks he knows, and the more willing he is to employ any and all measures to enforce his views upon others.
• It did not come naturally; in fact, it would be difficult to conceive of any more dogmatic and less tolerant people than the first settlers on New England shores.
• If there is anything worse than international warfare, is civil warfare, and the United States was destined to experience it in the extreme of bitterness.
• If there ever was a militant religion, it was that of early New England.
• Ideas have unhinged the gates of empires.
• How strange it is that murder has the sanction of law in one and only one of the human relationships, and that is the most important of all, that of nation to nation.
• In course of time, religion came with its rites invoking the aid of good spirits which were even more powerful than the bad spirits, and thus for the time being tempered the agony of fears.
• In the clashes between ignorance and intelligence, ignorance is generally the aggressor.
• One's religion is one's own possession and he has a right to it.
• Individuals and nations owe it to themselves and the world to become informed.
• Descendants of New England pioneers are proud of their ancestry and glad to proclaim the fact that so far as the United States are concerned, New England is in deed the cradle of religious liberty.
• But primitive man had enemies real as well as imaginary, and they were not subject to priestly sorceries.
• It has been the way of Rotary to focus thought upon matters in which members are in agreement, rather than upon matters in which they are in disagreement.
• It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice.
• Many obstacles to the expansion of good will have presented themselves.
• Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.
• In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.