I’m a vague, conjunctured personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.
There was a time when corporations played a minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.
Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.
The man who has no vision will undertake no great enterprise.
People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately.
Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.
When the representatives of “Big Business” think of the people, they do not include themselves.
Whatever may be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least can be said of it, that it gives a man time to think between sentences.
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.
There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.
The presidential office is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint.
If you would be a leader of men, you must lead your own generation, not the next.
If I cannot retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally to knock him down.
I have sometimes heard men say politics must have nothing to do with business, and I have often wished that business had nothing to do with politics.
Never for a moment have I had one doubt about my religious beliefs. There are people who believe only so far as they can understand – that seems to me presumptuous and sets their understanding as the standard of the universe.
Every man who takes office in Washington either grows or swells, and when I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing. The mischief of it is that when they swell, they do not swell enough to burst.
A presidential campaign may easily degenerate into a mere personal contest, and so lose its real dignity. There is no indispensable man.
A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.
The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.
The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night.