“If this humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.”

There are a great many people who are in favor of conservation no matter what it means.

Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken without developing new evils requiring new remedies.

Don’t worry over what the newspapers say. I don’t. Why should anyone else? I told the truth to the newspaper correspondents – but when you tell the truth to them they are at sea.

The intoxication of power rapidly sobers off in the knowledge of its restrictions and under the prompt reminder of an ever-present and not always considerate press, as well as the kindly suggestions that not infrequently come from Congress.

No, the only things which do not bother me are the elements. I can overcome them without a fight. All one has to do to get the best of the elements is to stand pat and one will win.

We are imperfect. We cannot expect perfect government.

A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.

I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe.

Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.

Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority.

I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.

The true Mason always carries his working tools everywhere.

We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.

The man with the average mentality, but with control, with a definite goal, and a clear conception of how it can be gained, and above all, with the power of application and labor, wins in the end.

I know this, and I know it from actual experience in the Orient, that the progress of modern Christian civilization has largely depended on the earnest hard work of the Christian missions of every denomination.

We shall have to begin all over again. [Taft hoped that] the Senators might change their minds, or that the people might change the Senate; instead of which they changed me.

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

I took my grandmother to the emergency room. The doctor said that she was on an artificial life support system, and that although her brain was dead her heart was still beating. I though, “we’ve never had a democrat in the family before”.

The truth is that brains have little to do with either the making or accumulating of money.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.

A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.

I’ve started doing yoga and meditation, but I’m not very good at that kind of thing and turning my brain off.

The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.