Quote collection
331 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The budget idea, I may admit, is a sort of obsession with me. I believe in budgets. I want other people to believe in them. I have had a small one to run my own home; and besides that, I am the head of the organization that makes the greatest of all budgets, that of the United States Government. Do you wonder, then, that at times I dream of balance sheets and sinking funds?"
"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty."
"As I went about with my father, when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid someone had to work hard to earn the money to pay them."
"The strength of a country is the strength of its religious convictions."
"There have been great men with little of what we call education. There have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never been a great people who did not possess great learning."
"Numbered among our population are some 12,000,000 colored people. Under our Constitution their rights are just as sacred as those of any other citizen. It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights. The Congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crime of lynching, of which the negroes are by no means the sole sufferers, but for which they furnish a majority of the victims."
"Despotism has forever had a powerful hold upon the world. Autocratic government, not self-government, has been the prevailing state of mankind. The record of past history is the record, not of the success of republics, but of their failure."
"We have too much legislating by clamor, by tumult, by pressure. Representative government ceases when outside influence of any kind is substituted for the judgment of the representative."
"To place your name by gift or bequest in the keeping of an active educational institution is to...make a permanent contribution to the welfare of humanity."
"No one ever lost his job by listening too much."
"The business of the country is business."
"You know, I have found in the course of a long public life that the things I did not say never hurt me."
"Business will be either better or worse."
"The chief business of America is business."
"Some of the offers that have come to me would never have come if I had not been President. That means these people are trying to hire not Calvin Coolidge, but a former President of the United States. I can't make that kind of use of the office.... I can't do anything that might take away from the Presidency any of its dignity, or any of the faith people have in it."
"The president stands between the twin mirrors of the past and future, causing his being to become reflected an infinite amount of times. At first, this can be very disorienting. But it induces the president to move quickly. He may, for example, mimic a wave with his arms in order to see how his actions extend across this mirroring of time, observing if the figure at the end acts at the same instant as the figure before him, and so on and so forth."
"We do not need to import any foreign economic ideas or any foreign government. We had better stick to the American brand of government, the American brand of equality, and the American brand of wages. America had better stay American"
"The centralization of power in Washington, which nearly all members of Congress deplore in their speech and then support by their votes, steadily increases."
"The attempt to regulate, control, and prescribe all manner of conduct and social relations is very old. It was always the practice of primitive peoples."
"We need not concern ourselves much about rights of property if we faithfully observe the rights of persons."