What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation can do, but what he or it actually does.
A revolution is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual the country in which they take place is going down-hill.
There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.
If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office.
All for each, and each for all, is a good motto; but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain himself as not to be a burden to others.
I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding.
The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.
In the long run, the most unpleasant truth is a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood.
I don’t think any President ever enjoyed himself more than I did. Moreover, I don’t think any ex-President ever enjoyed himself more.
I’m as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the limit.
Anything that encourages pauperism, anything that relaxes the manly fiber and lowers self-respect, is an unmixed evil.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism.
The wolf is the arch type of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation.
It is, of course, the merest truism to say a party is of use only so far as it serves the nation.
When money comes in at the gate, sport flies out at the window.
No people ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.
A just war is in the long run far better for a man’s soul than the most prosperous peace.
Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.
War is not merely justifiable, but imperative upon honorable men, upon an honorable nation, where peace can only be obtained by the sacrifice of conscientious conviction or of national welfare.
The wild life of today is not ours to do with as we please. The original stock was given to us in trust for the benefit both of the present and the future. We must render an accounting of this trust to those who come after us.