George Frisbie Hoar

George Frisbie Hoar (29 August 1826 – 30 September 1904) was a prominent American politician and United States Senator from Massachusetts.

8 quotes
0 likes
0Verified
15 days agoLast Quote

Timeline

First Quote Added

April 10, 2026

Latest Quote Added

April 10, 2026

All Quotes by This Author

"As the American youth for uncounted centuries shall visit the capital of his country—strongest, richest, freest, happiest of the nations of the earth—from the stormy coast of New England, from the luxuriant regions of the Gulf, from the lakes, from the prairie and the plain, from the Golden Gate, from far Alaska—he will admire the evidences of its grandeur and the monuments of its historic glory. He will find there rich libraries and vast museums, and great cabinets which show the product of that matchless inventive genius of America, which has multiplied a thousand fold the wealth and comfort of human life. He will see the simple and modest portal through which the great line of the Republic's chief magistrates have passed at the call of their country to assume an honor surpassing that of emperors and kings, and through which they have returned, in obedience to her laws, to take their place again as equals in the ranks of their fellow-citizens. He will stand by the matchless obelisk which, loftiest of human structures, is itself but the imperfect type of the loftiest of human characters. He will gaze upon the marble splendors of the Capitol, in whose chambers are enacted the statutes under which the people of a continent dwell together in peace, and the judgments are rendered which keep the forces of states and nation alike within their appointed bounds. He will look upon the records of great wars and the statues of great commanders. But, if he know his country's history, and consider wisely the sources of her glory, there is nothing in all these which will so stir his heart as two fading and time-soiled papers, whose characters were traced by the hand of the fathers a hundred years ago. They are the original records of the acts which devoted this nation forever to equality, to education, to religion, and to liberty. One is the Declaration of Independence, the other the Ordinance of 1787."

- George Frisbie Hoar

• 0 likes• activists-from-the-united-states• civil-rights-activists• academics-from-the-united-states• members-of-the-united-states-senate• politicians-from-boston•
"He embodied all the virtues of the classic New Englander and few of the vices. His loyalty was granite-ribbed; he revered the Constitution and all the institutions born and reared under it. He was proud of the United States, but his heart belonged to Massachusetts. In his mouth the name took on a beauty and an emotion which never ceased to stir me-Westerner that I was. Combined with his patriotic loyalties was a passionate devotion to classic literature-Greek, Roman, English. He knew yards of Homer and Virgil, as well as of the greatest of the early English writers, and not infrequently at our Sunday morning breakfasts he would repeat long passages in his sonorous voice. "Earning money is hateful to me," he said. "Never in all my life before have I undertaken a thing I did not want to do simply for money. Some things I like to do, believe that I can do better than I could do anything else. I never was such a donkey before. There are so many things I long to do; one of them is to learn Italian well enough to read Dante and Boccaccio and Ariosto in the original; and I want to commit Homer to memory. I would like to have my head packed with Greek." The Senator's Sunday morning talks were rich with anecdotes of New England types. He had his antipathies-Margaret Fuller Ossoli was one of them."

- George Frisbie Hoar

• 0 likes• activists-from-the-united-states• civil-rights-activists• academics-from-the-united-states• members-of-the-united-states-senate• politicians-from-boston•
"... this was the Senator on a vacation, the Senator of our Sunday morning's breakfast. Take him when public affairs were in a serious tangle, and he was glum, unapproachable. He suffered deeply over the trend to imperialism after the Spanish-American War. To save Cuba from the maladministration of Spain, to watch over her until she had learned to govern herself seemed to him a noble expression of Americanism, but to annex lands on the other side of the globe for commercial purposes only, as he believed, was to be false to all our ideals. He had the early American conviction that minding one's own business was even more important abroad than at home. He wanted no entangling alliances, and in those days following the treaty of Paris he feared as never before for the country. His greatest speech against the advancing imperialism was made in April of 1900. At the head of the printed copy of his speech distributed by the Senate he placed these sentences: “No right under the Constitution to hold Subject States. To every People belongs the right to establish its own government in its own way. The United States can not with honor buy the title of a dispossessed tyrant, or crush a Republic." I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service, of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals."

- George Frisbie Hoar

• 0 likes• activists-from-the-united-states• civil-rights-activists• academics-from-the-united-states• members-of-the-united-states-senate• politicians-from-boston•