I should indeed be glad to find a short cut to end the 
struggle with the immensities of human problems. I have no 
word of criticism but rather great sympathy with those who 
honestly search human experience and human thought for some 
new way out, where human selfishness has no opportunities, 
where freedom requires no safeguards, where justice requires 
no striving, where bread comes without contention and little 
sweat. Such dreams are not without value, and one could join 
in them with satisfaction but for the mind troubled by 
recollection of human frailty, the painful human advance 
through history, the long road which humanity still has to 
travel to economic and social perfections, and but for the 
woeful confirmations which the world has given of the 
failure of idealism alone, without the compass of 
experience.

-- Herbert Hoover, 1934

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