Gerald Stanley Lee

Gerald Stanley Lee (1862 – 1944) was an American Congregational clergyman and the author of numerous books and essays.

Crowds (1913)

 * I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before.
 * Book II, Chapter III.


 * Business today consists in persuading crowds.
 * Book II, Chapter V.


 * It is never the machines that are dead. It is only the mechanically-minded men that are dead.
 * Book II, Chapter V.


 * Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.
 * Book II, Chapter VIII.


 * A man's success in business today turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want.
 * Book II, Chapter IX.


 * The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.
 * Book II, Chapter XV.


 * What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity.
 * Book II, Chapter XVIII.


 * Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.
 * Book IV, Chapter X.


 * Crowds speak in heroes.
 * Book IV, Chapter III.


 * America is a tune. It must be sung together.
 * Book V, Part III, Chapter XII.


 * 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.
 * Book V, Part III, Chapter XVI.

About

 * It is idle to say you are only fining a man a farthing, if he chooses to say it is his lucky farthing. It is waste of breath to call a thing a rag when he calls it a flag. This is the fallacy of those who, like Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, the able American critic, imagine that a war must be a misunderstanding, which social intercourse and explanation would have set right.
 * G. K. Chesterton, "Is the War Just a Misunderstanding" (January 29, 1916), reported in The collected works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume 30 (1988), p. 366.