Quote collection
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"I am not one of those who have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for. I have seen fools resist Providence before, and I have seen their destruction, as will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns."
"When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know that you have come into the presence of fire - that it is best not uncautiously to touch that man - that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him."
"That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too."
"Such a mind we must desire to see in a woman,--a mind that stirs without irritating you, that arouses but does not belabour, amuses and yet subtly instructs."
"Let him [the President] once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him.... If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when the President is of such insight and caliber."
"Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this western world with all those fine impulses which have built up human liberty on sides of the water. She stands, therefore, as an example of independence, as an example of free institutions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the main tenets of justice."
"America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it."
"One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. Ay any rate, if it is heat it ought to be white heat and not sputter, because sputtering heat is apt to spread the fire. There ought, if there is any heat at all, to be that warmth of the heart which makes every man thrust aside his own personal feeling, his own personal interest, and take thought of the welfare and benefit of others."
"The firm basis of government is justice, not pity."
"I have sometimes heard men say politics must have nothing to do with business, and I have often wished that business had nothing to do with politics."
"Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up."
"The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night."
"The presidential office is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint."
"If I cannot retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally to knock him down."
"If you would be a leader of men, you must lead your own generation, not the next."
"There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality."
"Whatever may be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least can be said of it, that it gives a man time to think between sentences."
"The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds."
"Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies."
"The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other."