Do you think you can cure the hatreds and the maladjustments of the world by hanging them? You simply show your ignorance and your hate when you say it. You may here and there cure hatred with love and understanding, but you can only add fuel to the flames by cruelty and hate.
Eugene V. Debs has always been one of my heroes.
Probably the undertaker thinks less of death than almost any other man. He is so accustomed to it that his mind must involuntarily turn from its horror to a contemplation of how much he makes out of the burial.
No man is a good citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, or a good man just because he obeys the law. The intrinsic worth is determined mainly by the intrinsic make-up.
I am always suspicious of righteous indignation. Nothing is more cruel than righteous indignation.
Most lawyers only tell you about the cases they win. I can tell you about some I lose. A lawyer who wins all his cases does not have many.
Justice must take account of infinite circumstances which a human being cannot understand.
I knew that it is out of the question to have honest, economical government while a few are inordinately rich and the great mass of men are poor. In fact, it is to be doubted if anything really worthwhile can be done until there is a fairer distribution of wealth.
Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.
I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here.
Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.
One believes in the truthfulness of a man because of his long experience with the man, and because the man has always told a consistent story. But no man has told so consistent a story as nature.
No nation can be really great that is held together by Gatling guns, and no true loyalty can be induced and kept through fear.
No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism.
Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought – even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.
Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document?
Any one who thinks is an agnostic about something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded.
In life one cannot eat his cake and have it, too; he must make his choice and then do the best he can to be content to go the way his judgment leads.
Hoover, if elected, will do one thing that is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: he will make a great man out of Coolidge.
People in this world are not often logical.