Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord’s Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.
The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.
Golf is a game in which one endeavors to control a ball with implements ill adapted for the purpose.
By ‘radical,’ I understand one who goes too far; by ‘conservative,’ one who does not go far enough; by ‘reactionary,’ one who won’t go at all.
America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.
Interest does not tie nations together; it sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite them.
The question of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.
My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness.
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.
There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.
I have no happy fairyland vision that she can win.
All the extraordinary men I have known were extraordinary in their own estimation.
If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig.
We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors, to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of the things that unite.
The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared for him-not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.
There is no cause half so sacred as the cause of the people. There is no idea so uplifting as the idea of the service of humanity.
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.
But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts.