Elbert Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915) was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. He was an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement and is, perhaps, most famous for his essay A Message to Garcia.

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"A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.""A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.""A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.""A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.""A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman as bad as she dares.""A man is not paid for having a head and hands, but for using them.""A pessimist? That's a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.""A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.""A woman will doubt everything you say except it be compliments to herself.""An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all.""Art is not a thing; it is a way.""Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.""Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.""Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time.""Christianity supplies a Hell for the people who disagree with you and a Heaven for your friends.""Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly.""Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.""Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed - there's so little competition.""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.""Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.""Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.""Fear clogs; faith liberates.""Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.""Friendship, like credit, is highest when it is not used.""Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.""God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas, but for scars.""He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved much.""He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.""How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience would have achieved success.""I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.""If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.""If you can't answer a man's arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.""In order to have friends, you must first be one.""Initiative is doing the right things without being told.""It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires great strength to decide on what to do.""It is easy to get everything you want, provided you first learn to do without the things you cannot get.""It may happen sometimes that a long debate becomes the cause of a longer friendship. Commonly, those who dispute with one another at last agree.""It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.""Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer to your goal.""Life in abundance comes only through great love.""Life is just one damned thing after another.""Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.""Live truth instead of professing it.""Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away.""Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.""Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.""Men are only as great as they are kind.""Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.""Never get married in college; it's hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you've already made one mistake.""No one ever gets far unless he accomplishes the impossible at least once a day.""Often we can help each other most by leaving each other alone; at other times we need the hand-grasp and the word of cheer.""One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.""Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant - the digitalis of failure.""Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.""Polygamy: An endeavour to get more out of life than there is in it.""Positive anything is better than negative nothing.""Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.""Responsibility is the price of freedom.""Reversing your treatment of the man you have wronged is better than asking his forgiveness.""Secrets are things we give to others to keep for us.""So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.""The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.""The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.""The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.""The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.""The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you'll make one.""The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.""The highest reward that God gives us for good work is the ability to do better work.""The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.""The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods.""The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.""The love we give away is the only love we keep.""The man who has no problems is out of the game.""The man who knows it can't be done counts the risk, not the reward.""The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.""The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence.""The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.""The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.""The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.""The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.""The teacher is the one who gets the most out of the lessons, and the true teacher is the learner.""The thing we fear we bring to pass.""The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.""There is no failure except in no longer trying.""There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.""This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.""To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.""We are not punished for our sins, but by them.""We are punished by our sins, not for them.""We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.""We work to become, not to acquire.""Where much is expected from an individual, he may rise to the level of events and make the dream come true.""Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you."

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Hubbard was born in Bloomington, Illinois, to Silas Hubbard and Juliana Frances Read. He grew up in Hudson, Illinois, where his first business venture was selling Larkin soap products, a career which eventually brought him to Buffalo, New York. His innovations for Larkin included premiums and "leave on trial". His best-known work came after he founded Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts movement community in East Aurora, New York in 1895. This grew from his private press, the Roycroft Press, which was inspired by William Morris's Kelmscott Press. (Although called the "Roycroft Press" by latter-day collectors and print historians, the organization called itself "The Roycrofters" and "The Roycroft Shops".)

Hubbard edited and published two magazines, The Philistine and The Fra. The Philistine was bound in brown butcher paper and full of satire and whimsy. (Hubbard himself quipped that the cover was butcher paper because: "There is meat inside.") The Roycrofters produced handsome, if sometimes eccentric, books printed on handmade paper, and operated a fine bindery, a furniture shop, and shops producing modeled leather and hammered copper goods. They were a leading producer of Mission Style products.

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. The Roycroft Shops became a site for meetings and conventions of radicals, freethinker, 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".

In 1908, Hubbard was the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of The Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves. 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 Ida Straus, who as a woman was supposed to be placed on a lifeboat in precedence to the men, but 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."

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This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Elbert Hubbard", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0

Total Books: 1167

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