Presidents Of The United States

"We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think to-day as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union."

"Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation... If this organization is ever to have another hearing before me it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me..."

"You deal in the raw material of opinion, and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world."

"The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. It represents the experiences made by men and women, the experiences of those who do and live under that flag."

"No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation."

"The way to stop financial joy-riding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile."

"I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow, and I have borrowed a lot since I read it to you first."

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men."

"There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States."

"You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality."

"The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action."

"There is a very great thrill to be had from the memories of the American Revolution, but the American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation, and the duty laid upon us by that beginning is the duty of bringing the things then begun to a noble triumph of completion."

"I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty."

"There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with."

"The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose."

"The working people of America, — if they must be distinguished from the minority that constitutes the rest of it, — are, of course, the backbone of the Nation. No law that safeguards their lives, that improves the physical and moral conditions under which they live, that makes their hours of labor rational and tolerable, that gives them freedom to act in their own interest, and that protects them where they cannot project themselves, can properly be regarded as class legislation or as anything but as a measure taken in the interest of the whole people, whose partnership in right action we are trying to establish and make real and practical. It is in this spirit that we shall act if we are genuine spokesmen of the whole country."

"Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation."

"I would … rather lose in a cause that I know some day will triumph than triumph in a cause that I know some day will lose."

"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it."

"If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing."

"Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I would do just as he suggested."

"You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible…. But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise."

"Prosperity … is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign."

"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."

"I always remember that America was established not to create wealth—though any nation must create wealth which is going to make an economic foundation for its life—but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal. America has put itself under bonds to the earth to discover and maintain liberty now among men, and if she cannot see liberty now with the clear, unerring vision she had at the outset, she has lost her title, she has lost every claim to the leadership and respect of the nations of the world."

"In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or lower grade,—of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations."

"Liberty is its own reward."

"You are not here merely to prepare to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand."

"We have stood apart, studiously neutral."

"Every country-side wished to have its own Ku Klux, founded in secrecy and mystery like the mother ‘Den’ at Pulaski, until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an ‘Invisible Empire of the South,’ bound together in loose organization to protect the southern country from some of the ugliness hazards of a time of revolution."

"It was plain to see that the trouble in the southern States arose out of the exclusion of the better whites from the electoral suffrage no less than from the admission of the most ignorant blacks."

"The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”"

"The great voice of America does not come from the seats of learning, but in a murmur from the hills and the woods and the farms and the factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us the voice from the homes of the common men. Do these murmurs come into the corridors of the university? I have not heard them."

"At every crisis in one's life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving."

"The Southern legislatures which Mr. Johnson authorized set up saw the need for action no less than Congress did. It was a menace to society itself that the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left without tutelage or restraint. Some stayed very quietly by their old masters and gave no trouble, but most yielded, as was to have been expected, to the novel impulses and excitement of freedom and made their way to the camps and cities, where the blue-coated soldiers were, and the agents of the Freedman’s Bureau."

"RADICAL—one who goes too far. CONSERVATIVE—one who does not go far enough. REACTIONARY—one who does not go at all."

"Adventurers swarmed out of the North to cozen, beguile, and use them. These men were ‘carpet baggers’… They gained the confidence of the negroes, obtained for themselves the most lucrative offices, and lived upon the public treasury, public contracts, and their easy control of affairs… For the Negroes there was nothing but occasional allotments of abandon or forfeited land, the pay of petty offices, a per diem allowances as members of the conventions and the state legislatures which their new masters made business for, or the wages of servants in the various offices of administration. Their ignorance and credulity made them easy dupes."

"The only thing that has ever distinguished America among the nations is that she has shown that all men are entitled to the benefits of the law."

"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused."

"Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life."

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

"[W]e are not bound to adhere to the doctrine held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence."

"The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. By the time a man has grown old enough to have a son in college he has specialized. The university should generalize the treatment of its undergraduates, should struggle to put them in touch with every force of life. Every man of established success is dangerous to society. His tendency is to keep society as it is. His success has been founded upon it. You will not find many reformers among the successful men. A man told me once that he left college interested in humanity. At 40 he was interested only in an industry to which he had applied himself. At 60 he was interested only in his bank account. Any social change affects that bank account. Society cannot progress without change."

"No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence."

"The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it."

"The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes."

"Opinion shifted uneasily, the while, the nation through. The unexpected scope and magnitude of the war, its slow and sullen movement, its anxious strain of varying fortune, its manifest upheaval of the vary foundations of government, turned men's hopes and fears now this way now that, threw their judgements all abroad, brought panic gusts of disquietude and dismay which lasted a long season through before any steady winds of purpose found their breath and their second quarter. For eighteen months Mr. Lincoln had waited upon opinion, with a patience which had deeply irritated all who wished radical action taken. He knew the hazards of time as well as any man; feared that at almost any moment news might come of the recognition of the southern Confederacy by the old governments abroad; knew how important success was to hold opinion at home no less than to check interference from without; was keenly conscious how the failures of the Army of the Potomac offset and neutralized the successes of the federal arms in the West; and realized to the full how awkward it was, whether for the government of opinion at home or over sea, to have no policy more handsome than conquest and subjugation. It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against States fighting for their independence to a war against States fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery, by making some open move for emancipation as the real motive of the struggle. Once make the war a struggle against slavery, and the world, it might be hoped, might see it as a moral war, not a political; and the sympathy of nations would begin to run for the North, not the South."

"Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes. The white men were aroused by a mere instinct of self-preservation — until at last there sprung into existence a great Kuklux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country."

"No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle."

"The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to draw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their development: to enlighten, strengthen and make fit."