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This
is for my friend Bill Murphy, and his colleague Chris Powell, of GATA.
We who invest in precious metals owe them a deep debt of gratitude and
respect for their long and sometimes lonely fight, against often fearsome
odds and tough criticism, to bring transparency and honesty to the markets.
"Today I shall speak to you on the subject of individual
citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to
me and my countrymen, because you and we a great citizens of great democratic
republics. A democratic republic such as ours - an effort to realize its full
sense government by, of, and for the people - represents the most gigantic of
all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities
alike for good and evil. The success or republics like yours and like ours
means the glory, and our failure of despair, of mankind; and for you and for
us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme.
Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men,
the quality of the leaders is all-important. If, under such governments, the
quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nations for generations lead a
brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no
matter how low the quality of average citizen; because the average citizen is
an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type
of national greatness.
But with you and us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my
own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the
way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first
in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great
occasional cries which call for heroic virtues.
The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed.
The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the
main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average
citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see
that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot
be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It
is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any
democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in
this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts
of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. 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 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 a 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 twister
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 to second 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 to think, of
superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part
painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of
contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from
themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is
easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle
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, who
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 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 neither know victory nor
defeat."
Theodore
Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena,, Paris, April 23, 1910
Every
time that I look in the mirror
All these lines in my face gettin' clearer
The past is gone
It went by like dusk to dawn
Isn't that the way
Everybody's got their dues in life to pay.
Yeah, I know nobody knows
Where it comes and where it goes
I know it's everybody's sin
You got to lose to know how to win.
Half my life's in books' written pages
Live and learn from fools and from sages
You know it's true
All the things you do
Come back to you.
Dream On Dream On Dream On,
Dream until your dream comes true...
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