Ed, I think you might enjoy the following commentary on critics and cynics from one of our nation's greatest doers:
You and those like you have received special advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity
for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for the
enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind
much has been given, and from you much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings
against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men
of inherited wealth and position, should especially guard themselves, because to these failings
they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their--your--chances of useful service are at an end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to
pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs,
the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a
sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who
confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even
attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either
really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty,
whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to
achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the
critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with
life’s realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of
weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who
seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievement of others, to hide from others and from
themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the
man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or
where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;
who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and
shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms,
the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the
triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor
defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a
fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.
From Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," address delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris,
April 23, 1910; in Selected Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. VI (New York: New Bartleby
Library, 1998) |
