Lincoln Steffens Father Quotations

One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.

If my father could watch my son for a while, he might realize his own immortality.

My father, the practical joker, did not care for practical jokes on himself; he did not encourage the practice in me.

I let my boy go and do and say pretty much as he likes, as, and perhaps because, my father kept no string on me.

My father made with me one serious mistake which I see parents about me making. He got himself somehow into the awkward position of an authority; I thought he knew and was right on everything - for a while.

My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.

My father seemed always to know not only what I was doing, but what I was being.

My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion.

My father would invite me sweetly to come and sit on a stool at his feet, and, as I let myself trustingly down, he would gently kick the seat from under me - and laugh.

I hunted far enough to suspect that the Fathers of the Republic who wrote our Sacred Constitution of the United States not only did not, but did not want to, establish a democratic government.