Follette Quotes & Sayings

If experience teaches anything, it is that what the community undertakes to do is usually done badly. This is due in part to the temptation to corruption that such enterprises involve, but even more, perhaps, to the lack of personal interest on the part of those engaged in them. — Suzanne La Follette

If responsibility for the upbringing of children is to continue to be vested in the family, then the rights of children will be secured only when parents are able to make a living for their families with so little difficulty that they may give their best thought and energy to the child's development and the problem of helping it adjust itself to the complexities of the modern environment. — Suzanne La Follette

In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war. — Robert M. La Follette

Under a monopolistic economic system the opportunity to earn a living by one's labour comes to be regarded as a privilege instead of a natural right. Women are simply held to be less entitled to this privilege than men. — Suzanne La Follette

Where is the society which does not struggle along under a dead-weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfather? — Suzanne La Follette

No human being, man, woman, or child, may safely be entrusted to the power of another; for no human being may safely be trusted with absolute power. — Suzanne La Follette

God, how patient are Thy poor! These corporations and masters of manipulation in finance heaping up great fortunes by a system of legalized extortion, and then exacting from the contributors-to whom a little means so much-a double share to guard the treasure! — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

The worst effect of tutelage is that it negates self-discipline, and therefore people suddenly released from it are almost bound to make fools of themselves. — Suzanne La Follette

All political and religious systems have their root and their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and its intense fear of autonomy. — Suzanne La Follette

There is no relation more intimately personal than that of parents to the child they have brought into the world; and there is therefore no relationship in which the community should be slower to interfere. — Suzanne La Follette

If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another ... after the war is on. — Robert M. La Follette

The principle of free speech is no new doctrine born of the Constitution of the United States. It is a heritage of English-speaking peoples, which has been won by incalculable sacrifice, and which they must preserve so long as they hope to live as free men. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured. — Suzanne La Follette

People never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live. — Suzanne La Follette

Real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the disappearance of advantage, and primarily of economic advantage. — Suzanne La Follette

I believe my most important job is being there when you need help. — Doug La Follette

Motherhood, to be sure, receives a great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly masculine society. Per se it is accorded no respect whatever. When it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child - an ostracism and obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father does not share. — Suzanne La Follette

Men must be aggressive for what is right if government is to be saved from men who are aggressive for what is wrong. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

Every nation has its war party ... It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition. — Robert M. La Follette

Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction. — Suzanne La Follette

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained. — Suzanne La Follette

It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly. — Suzanne La Follette

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody. — Suzanne La Follette

Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

Wealth has never yet sacrificed itself on the altar of patriotism. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

When one hears the argument that marriage should be indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood. — Suzanne La Follette

Publicity, discussion, and agitation are necessary to accomplish any work of lasting benefit. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

Most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word "human." — Suzanne La Follette

When once a social order is well established, no matter what injustice it involves, those who occupy a position of advantage are not long in coming to believe that it is the only possible and reasonable order ... — Suzanne La Follette

Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

Anyone who has not known that inestimable privilege can possibly realize what good fortune it is to grow up in a home where there are grandparents. — Suzanne La Follette

Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly. — Robert M. La Follette

The will of the people shall be the law of the land — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

The desire to enforce our own moral and spiritual criteria upon posterity is quite as strong as the desire to enforce them upon contemporaries. — Suzanne La Follette

Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging war on the railroads that ruled his state. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

What its children become, that will the community become. — Suzanne La Follette