Life & Wisdom Quote by Agnes Repplier

Democracy, in Repplier's hands, isn't a saint betrayed by sinners; it's a flirt that lives on the gap between promise and performance. "Forever teases" is the tell. The word makes the system feel almost sentient, mischievous, even cruelly patient, as if democratic life depends on keeping citizens slightly dissatisfied - alert enough to demand better, not so disillusioned that they quit. Teasing implies desire and delay: the ideals stay just within reach, close enough to animate reform, far enough to expose hypocrisy.

The sentence is built on paired contrasts, and that structure is the argument. "Ideals" versus "realities" is the familiar civic heartbreak, but Repplier sharpens it with "heroic possibilities" against "sorry achievements". "Heroic" dignifies the stakes; "sorry" refuses the comforting myth that progress is automatic. The subtext is a warning against both romanticism and cynicism: romanticism ignores the record; cynicism forgets the possibilities. Democracy survives by making room for both moods, then daring you to do something with the discomfort.

Context matters: Repplier wrote across Reconstruction's aftershocks, mass immigration, industrial labor unrest, women's suffrage, World War I, and the early New Deal era. American democracy in that span repeatedly proclaimed moral grandeur while practicing exclusion, patronage, and coercion. Her line reads like a seasoned observer's refusal to be surprised - and her quiet insistence that the system's most honest feature is the tension it cannot resolve.