Quote collection
459 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad."
"There is a very holy and a very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist."
"The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control."
"The way to be patriotic in America is not only to love America, but to love the duty that lies nearest to our hand, and to know that in performing it we are serving our country."
"It recognizes no morality but a sham morality meant for deceit, no honor even among thieves and of a thievish sort, no force but physical force, no intellectual power but cunning, no disgrace but failure, no crime but stupidity."
"Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business."
"Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students."
"The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straitjacket. In its elasticity lies its chief greatness."
"It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs."
"Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great fields on which men likehimself struggle, with unflagging, pathetic hope, toward better things.... He is a guide, a counselor, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind."
"Bagehot did what so many thousand of young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and then, having prepared himself to practise law, followed another large body of young men in deciding to abandon it."
"An evident principleis the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak."
"Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas."
"Death comes along like a gas bill one can't payand that's all one can sayabout it."
"It is a protest against the way the world has worked. (explanation of Bolshevism)"
"The growth of our nation and all its activities are in the hands of a few men."
"And while you bring all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other countries behind you - bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them."
"Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles."
"To think that I, the son ofthe manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people."
"I confess my belief in the common man.... The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.... The man who is in the melee knows what blows are being struck and what blood is being drawn."