American clergyman & author (1862-1944)
Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being. The power of a man can be measured today by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what the city stands for -- the centre of mass.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
Crowds speak in heroes.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
There is never any real danger in allowing a pedestal for a hero. He never has time to sit on it. One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from under him, and using it to batter a world with.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
The idea ... that collective society should take hold of Evil and set it down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us absolutely sound. Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those who love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked. We prefer to have it attended to in a more dignified, impersonal way by Society as a whole.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's visions. Towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
Can men live in a machine-civilization, a civilization in which men are obliged to earn their money with machines, in which they cannot even spend it without machines -- have souls?... I have come to believe that it is not by any economic scheme, or social device, some way of inventing evil off the earth, but by great personal beliefs, that the battle for the existence of the soul in an age of machines will have to be fought. If it is true that these great, splendid, blind machines are crowding me, and crowding my brother, and even crowding God, from off the earth, there can be but one reason for it, and that is that my brother has been so busy in making bigger and bigger machines every year that he has forgotten to make bigger men to go with them, and bigger beliefs to make bigger men out of.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Inspired Millionaires
The most distinctively modern thing that ever happened was when Benjamin Franklin went out one day and called down lightning from heaven. Before that, power had always been dug up, or scraped off the ground. The more power you wanted the more you had to get hold of the ground and dig for it; and the more solid you were, the more heavy, solid things you could get, the more you could pull solid, heavy things round in this world where you wanted them. Franklin turned to the sky, and turned power on from above, and decided that the real and the solid and the substantial in this world was to be pulled about by the Invisible.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds