People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.
ATTRIBUTION:
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), U.S. author. Amory Blaine, in “Restlessness,” bk. 2, ch. 2, This Side of Paradise (1920).
