Great man theory

“ Whilst the theory of survival is illustrated by the superiority of Europeans to Hottentots, the great-man theory is illustrated by, and depends on, the superiority of men like Newton to the great mass of Europeans. ”

“ Individual effort and success are the indicators of the vitality and genius of a people. When individuals rise out of the indistinguishable mass and make their mark, we may rest assured that the mass is rich and capable of unlimited production. The great mass of every government, of every people, while adding to and creating greatness, go down in history unmentioned. But their glory, their genius, success and happiness, are expended and survive in the few great spirits their fortunate condition produced. ”

“ Spencer starts with saying that the chief impediment to social science is the great-man theory; • 25 for, if the appearance of the great man is incalculable, progress, if it depends on him, must be incalculable also; • 26 but if the great man is not a miraculous apparition, he owes his greatness to causes outside himself ”

“ He had the fatalism about him without which nothing great is achieved in times of political crisis; the consciousness of a divine work that must be done through him, though personal peace and honour were wrecked in the doing. They were men of theory and principle, ‘brave men and true.’ but with a sense of what was ‘due to their own reputation,’ or, to speak, more kindly, men who would sacrifice themselves or a nation indifferently to the maintenance of what might merely be a formula. ”

“ At the close of the seventeenth century the great lights had disappeared; he survived his fame, his generals, his family, and his friends; the infirmities of age oppressed his body, and the agonies of religious fears disturbed his soul. We see no greatness but in his magnificence; we strip him of all claims to genius, and even to enlightened statesmanship, and feel that his undoubted skill in holding the reins of government must be ascribed to the weakness and degradation of his subjects, rather than to his own strength. ”

“ One sees but little,—yet that little, caught here and there, so much resembles some of the attributes of the Great Power which created us, that the mind, trembling under the immensity of the conceptions it engenders, is lost in feelings which human beings cannot impart to each other. ”

“ In the lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the lives of the so-called 'great,'—those born, not to power, but in power,—there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. ”

“ Like the great and good of all ages—the men born in advance of their times, the men whose bleeding footprints attest the immense cost of reform, and show us the long and dreary spaces, between the luminous points in the progress of mankind,—this our noblest American hero must wait the polishing wheels of after-coming centuries to make his glory more manifest, and his worth more generally acknowledged. ”

“ No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. ”

“ Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great men exist that there may be greater men. ”

“ How many more great men should we have were this spirit universal, and how much greater would each one of us be if, in a simple straightforward manner, we frankly said and did the best that we knew, without fear or favor? ”

“ Great not only in brains, but great in heart, also, are the giant men of true greatness, who come down from the mountains into the arena of the world’s activities. They need no introduction. The world awaits them, recognizes, and hails them. ”

“ When we speak of greatness, then, in the sense here attributed to the word—when we speak of great men as agents of social progress—we do not mean that the world is divided into ordinary men and heroes. The members of that minority whom we group together as great men, though some of them are, no doubt, of noble and heroic proportions, are for the most part great in relation to special results only; even in relation to these special results they are great in very various degrees, and many of them in other relations may be ordinary, or even less than ordinary. ”

“ The world is formed of 'dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and thither, whithersoever they are led;' the great men are the 'guides of the dull host, who follow them as by an irrevocable decree.' They are the heroes to whom alone are granted real powers of vision and command ”

“ His was the rarer and the greater part, to lift men out of the low air of common life up to the heights, where thought is larger, and life runs richer, and the great verities are seen, undimmed by self and sophistry. ”

“ To my mind such are the greatest of great men, when measured by the transcendency of their doctrine and the service they render to all. By the influence of their idea, letters, philosophy, and politics become nobler and more beautiful, both in their forms and their substance. ”

“ In these grandest of all thinkings, the great men of this time showed a grandeur of thought worthy of their surpassing excellence in other noblest fields of human labour. They thought greatly because they aspired greatly. ”

“ If those great men had been content, like others, to continue as they began, and had never made their persevering efforts for improvement, what would their countries have benefited from their genius, or the world have known of their fame? ”

“ For the men who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by small increments, and so form a character of integrity before God and men, as solid and massive as the outward successes they conquer. ”

“ By the radicals the genius was regarded as an insult to the remainder of mankind. And how ordinary he was, this genius, compared with the grand figures of the time of the Renaissance; that time when men were weighed and valued, when elevation and inequality were acknowledged and acted upon, and Man became greater in stature, with Art his Will to Greatness! Well, we must weigh men again; we must deny equality; we must affirm aristocracy—in everything but commerce and production, where democracy is really a return to the aristocratic tradition. ”

“ Such a question may, at any rate, not unnaturally arise when we ask ourselves the question. What, on the whole, is the influence upon manhood—by which I mean, here and for my present purpose, the qualities that make courage, self-reliance, self-respect, industry, initiative—in fact, those independent and aggressive characteristics by which great races, like great men, have climbed up out of earlier obscurity and inferiority into power, leadership, and distinction ”

“ Now here, I submit, we get our right clew to the true position of man in history. We now see why great men had always to be possessed of peculiar will-power. They were great when the intensities of their ambitions, desires, or necessities forced from their soul-faculties some portions of knowledge which gave them a temporary ascendency, such, for instance, as would provide an advantage in strategy, statecraft, duplicity, treachery, or any other qualities which have assisted men who were leaders. ”

“ The wisdom of a teaching or of a policy is shown by its results, and these results are in most cases very gradually disclosed. Great men are like great mountains which are surrounded by lower peaks that often obscure their grandeur and seem to a near observer to equal or even to overtop them. It is only when seen from far off that their true dimensions are fully realised and they soar to heaven above all rivals. In the page of history men are judged mainly by the net result of their lives, by the broad lines of their characters and achievements. ”

“ Along with the whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts and appliances, he is a resultant.... You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.... Before he can remake his society, his society must make him. ”

“ Now the whole question of motive we will deal with later on. We will for the present put it altogether aside. We will assume a natural impulse on the part of all great men to develop their powers to the utmost, and employ them in influencing others, wholly independent of any other reward than such a minimum of sustenance and comfort as is physically essential to their efficiency; and we will confine our attention altogether to the question of the means by which the influence of the great men over the majority is obtained. ”

“ A great man, who towers far above the common heads, full of creative thought, of the ideas which move the world, able to organize that thought into institutions, laws, practical works; a man of a million, a million-minded man, at the head of a nation, putting his thought into them; ruling not barely by virtue of his position, but by the intellectual and moral power to fill it; ruling not over men's heads, but in their minds and hearts, and leading them to new fields of toil, increasing their numbers, wealth, intelligence, comfort, morals, piety—such a man is a noble sight ”

“ I do not speak rhetorically or use the cant of rhapsodists, but I utter my calm, deliberate conviction, when I say that the laborer ought to regard himself with a self-respect unknown to the proudest monarch who rests on outward rank.
I have now illustrated what I mean by the great ideas which exalt the mind. Their worth and power cannot be exaggerated. They are the mightiest influences on earth. One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him. ”

“ He leads by appealing to our own tendency, not by imposing something external upon us. Great men are therefore the symbols or expressions, in a sense, of the social conditions, under which they work, and if these conditions were not favorable the career of the great man would be impossible.
Does the leader, then, really lead, in the sense that the course of history would have been essentially different if he had not lived? Is the individual a true cause, or would things have gone on about the same if the famous men had been cut off in infancy? ”

“ To dwell in love, the wide house of the world, to stand in propriety, the correct seat of the world, and to walk in righteousness, the great path of the world; when he obtains his desire for office, to practise his principles for the good of the people, and when that desire is disappointed, to practise them alone; to be above the power of riches and honours to make dissipated, of poverty and mean condition to make swerve from the right, and of power and force to make bend—these characteristics constitute the great man. ”

“ These and others may be cited, who led a life of self-denial and reproach in order to spread the truths which save mankind. We naturally call their lot hard, even though they chose it; but it is the school of greatness. It was sad to see the wisest and best man of his day,--a man of family, of culture, of wealth, of learning, loving leisure, attached to his home and country, accustomed to honor and independence,--doomed to exile, poverty, neglect, and hatred, without those compensations which men of genius in our time secure. ”

“ Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it. ”

“ We feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the great men of past times, who have filled history with their deeds and the earth with their renown.
And yet it almost provokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition to see how they are crowded together and jostled in the dust; ”

“ “Mankind ought constantly to be striving to produce great men—this and nothing else is its duty.”) ”

“ We can never as a nation afford to forget that, back of our reason, our understanding, and our common-sense, there must lie, in full strength, the tremendous fundamental passions, which are not often needed, but which every truly great race must have as a well-spring of motive in time of need. ”

“ Even were we to grant the absurd supposition that the genesis of the great man does not depend on the antecedents furnished by the society he is born in, there would still be the quite-sufficient facts that he is powerless in the absence of the material and mental accumulations which his society inherits from the past, and that he is powerless in the absence of the coexisting population, character, intelligence, and social arrangements. ”

“ I believe that it is precisely out of the presence of these opposites and of the feelings they suscitate, that the great man arises,—for the great man is the broad arch which spans two banks lying far apart. ”

“ Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. ”

“ Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time. ”

“ The stature of the great man, one of whose peculiar charms consisted in his being so unlike all other great men, will rather lose than gain by the idealization which so easily runs into the commonplace. ”

“ Many are the lives of men unwritten, which have nevertheless as powerfully influenced civilisation and progress as the more fortunate Great whose names are recorded in biography. Even the humblest person, who sets before his fellows an example of industry, sobriety, and upright honesty of purpose in life, has a present as well as a future influence upon the well-being of his country; for his life and character pass unconsciously into the lives of others, and propagate good example for all time to come. ”