“The sum of the whole matter is this – our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.”

I would not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with great respect of the past.

We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.

Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord’s Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

The only use of an obstacle is to be overcome. All that an obstacle does with brave men is, not to frighten them, but to challenge them.

The man who has no vision will undertake no great enterprise.

To conquer with arms is to make only a temporary conquest; to conquer the world by earning its esteem is to make a permanent conquest.

No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States.

“Genius is divine perseverance.” Divine patience I believe he originally used, perseverance is better in my opinion. Genius I cannot claim nor even extra brightness but perseverance all can have.

We are intensely proud of their noble record and are glad to have had the whole world see how irresistible they are in their might when a cause which America holds dear is at stake. The whole nation has reason to be proud of them.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper’s that make an ordered life impossible.

What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives himself so long as he imagines it to lie in self-indulgence.

Benevolence does not consist in those who are prosperous pitying and helping those who are not. It consists in fellow feeling that puts you upon actually the same level with the fellow who suffers.

No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.

The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance, in every war they kill you in a new way.

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

Prejudices are the props of civilization.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.