The Pocket Elbert Hubbard

From Quote of the Day:

"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."

"An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness."

"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."

"Life is just one damned thing after another."

"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."

"A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist."

"The woman who cannot tell a lie in defense of her husband is unworthy of the name of wife."

"Death: To stop sinning suddenly."

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."

"Men are punished by their sins, not for them."

"If you can't answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names."

"God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars."

Elbert Hubbard was an old-school Arts and Crafts hippy who ran a magazine called The Philistine. L. Ron Hubbard's dad got the last name by adoption into some branch of Elbert Hubbard's family. Elbert's life seems to have followed the liberal youth to conservative elder arc (e.g., P. J. O'Rourke, Dennis Miller, David Horowitz, Christopher Hitchens, etc.):

Hubbard's second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, was a graduate of the New Thought-oriented Emerson College of Oratory in Boston and a noted suffragist, and the Roycroft Shops became a site for meetings and conventions of radicals, freethinkers, reformers and suffragists. Hubbard became a popular lecturer, and his homespun philosophy evolved from a loose William Morris-inspired socialism to an ardent defense of free enterprise and American know-how. Hubbard was much mocked in the press for "selling out."

Even back in the day, if you got too mainstream you were a sell-out. Meet the new boss indeed. The good thing about selling out is that it indicates that a lot of something is being sold. In his dottage, he became famous for writing the God and Country inspirational essay A Message To Garcia, which I had never heard of before, much like wearing onions in your belt, which was the fashion at the time.

Oddly, his Wikipedia biography is fixated on the topic of a husband and wife dying together:

In 1912, the famed passenger liner the Titanic was sunk after hitting an iceberg. Hubbard subsequently wrote of the disaster, singling out the story of the wife of Isador Straus, who as a woman was supposed to be placed on a lifeboat in precedence to the men. She refused to board the boat: "Not I -- I will not leave my husband. All these years we've traveled together, and shall we part now? No, our fate is one."

Hubbard then added his own stirring commentary: "Mr. and Mrs. Straus, I envy you that legacy of love and loyalty left to your children and grandchildren. The calm courage that was yours all your long and useful career was your possession in death. You knew how to do three great things -- you knew how to live, how to love and how to die.

"One thing is sure, there are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, and the other is by accident. All disease is indecent. Suicide is atrocious. But to pass out as did Mr. and Mrs. Isador Straus is glorious. Few have such a privilege. Happy lovers, both. In life they were never separated and in death they are not divided."

Coincidentally, he and the Mrs. were afforded exactly this privilege when when the Lusitania was torpedoed out from underneath them three years later.