“When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.”

When you have read the Bible, you will know it is the word of God, because you will have found it the key to your own heart, your own happiness and your own duty.

The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.

High society is for those who have stopped working and no longer have anything important to do.

Government ought to be all outside and no inside. Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

The whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man.

Character, my friends, is a byproduct. It is produced in the great manufacture of daily duty.

We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors, to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of the things that unite.

A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.

Has justice ever grown in the soil of absolute power? Has not justice always come from the … heart and spirit of men who resist power?

To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life.

At every crisis in one’s life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving.

Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.

The right is more precious than peace.

We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilizationitself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried closest to our hearts.

A man may be defeated by his own secondary successes.