How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Dale Carnegie

by Dale Carnegie

Schopenhauer had said it years ago: “Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.” One hardly thinks of the president of Yale as a vulgar man; yet a former president of Yale, Timothy Dwight, apparently took huge delight in denouncing a man who was running for President of the United States. The president of Yale warned that if this man were elected President, “we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution, soberly dishonoured, speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and virtue, the loathing of God and man.” Sounds almost like a denunciation of Hitler, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t. It was a denunciation of Thomas Jefferson. Which Thomas Jefferson? Surely not the immortal Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, the patron saint of democracy? Yea, verily, that was the man. What American do you suppose was denounced as a “hypocrite", “an impostor", and as “little better than a murderer”? A newspaper cartoon depicted him on a guillotine, the big knife read to cut off his head. Crowds jeered at him and hissed him as he rode through the street. Who was he? George Washington.