It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worthhearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own business.
Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.
We are the heirs of the ages.
Nine tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.
It was a pleasure to deal with a man of high ideals, who scorned everything mean and base, and who possessed those robust and hardy qualities of body and mind, for the lack of which no merely negative virtue can ever atone.
Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over any success or defeat.
It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.
Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.
No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.
I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.
The American people abhor a vacuum.
It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.
If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.
For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.
Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.
In life, as in football, the principle to follow is to hit the line hard.
Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.
There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.
It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone, but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching.