Ray Stannard Baker (April 17, 1870 in Lansing, Michigan – July 12, 1946 in Amherst, Massachusetts) (also known by his pen name David Grayson) was an American journalist, historian, biographer, and author.
Did you think you could have the good without the evil? Did you think you could have the joy without the sorrow?. . . . I have been thinking much about pain. How could I help it?. . . . Sooner or later, regardless of the wit of man, we have pain to face; a reality; a final inescapable, immutable fact of life. What poor souls, if we have then no philosophy to face it with! This pain will not last; it never has lasted. I'll think about what I am going to write tomorrow-not about me, not about my body.
Adventure is not outside; it is within.
Measured by any standard, white or black, Washington must be regarded today as one of the great men of this country: and in the future he will be so honored.
But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.
There must be a technique for meeting pain. There must be a technique of endurance based on the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity, as Marcus Aurelius taught long ago.
The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.
I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year.
We muckraked, not because we hated our world, but because we loved it. We were not hopeless, we were not cynical, we were not bitter.
Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.
Most of us have collections of sayings we live by. . . . Whenever words fly up at me from the printed page as I read, I intercept them instantly, knowing they are for me. I turn them over carefully in my mind and cling to them hard.
It is not short of amazing, the power of a great idea to weld men together. There was in it a peculiar, intense, vital spirit if you will, that I have never felt before in any strike.
When Lord Kelvin was in this country [U. S. ], he said that nothing interested him so much as Mr. Hewitt's work and his vacuum lamp.
In the beginning I thought, and still think, he did great good in giving support and encouragement to this movement. But I did not believe then, and have never believed since, that these ills can be settled by partisan political methods. They are moral and economic questions.