“A man’s rootage is more important than his leafage.”

If you’ve made up your mind you can do something, you’re absolutely RIGHT.

It does not become America that within her borders, where every man is free to follow the dictates of his conscience, men should raise the cry of church against church. To do that is to strike at the very spirit and heart of America.

The cure for bad politics is the same as the cure for tuberculosis. It is living in the open.

You cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil that is not native to it.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

Caution is the confidential agent of selfishness.

Today’s greatest labor-saving device is tomorrow.

To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking.

Power consists in one’s capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.

We have beaten the living, but we cannot fight the dead.

This was not after all a conventional war, a struggle between equally predacious powers; it was a war to end all wars.

Understanding is the soil in which grow all the fruits of friendship.

There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

Government, in it’s last analysis, is organized force.

The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury. Music now, more than ever before, is a national need.

A fault which humbles a person is of more use to him or her than a good action which puffs him or her up.

A man is what a woman makes him and a woman makes herself.

A paranoid man makes paranoid plans.

A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick.

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he’s crooked.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.