There is far more danger of harm than there is hope of good in any radical changes.
You have to stand every day three or four hours of visitors. Nine-tenths of them want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead-still they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.
The property of the people belongs to the people. To take it from them by taxation cannot be justified except by urgent public necessity. Unless this principle be recognized our country is no longer secure, our people no longer free.
The only hope of a short war is to prepare for a long one.
It is not easy to conceive of anything that would be more unfortunate in a community based upon the ideals of which Americans boast than any considerable development of intolerance as regards religion.
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.
The two great political parties of the nation have existed for the purpose, each in accordance with its own principles, of undertaking to serve the interests of the whole nation. Their members of the Congress are chosen with that great end in view.
Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.
Eat it up, make it do, wear it out.
What we need is not more Federal government, but better local government.
Changing a college curriculum is like moving a graveyard-you never know how many friends the dead have until you try to move them!
In a republic the first rule for the guidance of the citizen is obedience of the law.
What we need in appointive positions is men of knowledge and experience who have sufficient character to resist temptations.
It would be difficult to conceive a finer example of true sport.
Baseball is our national game.
American ideals do not require to be changed so much as they require to be understood and applied.
No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.
In other periods of depression, it has always been possible to see some things which were solid and upon which you could base hope, but as I look about, I now see nothing to give ground to hope-nothing of man.
The country is not in good condition.
Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind.