I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike.
— James A. Garfield
Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis.
Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.
Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.
A brave man is a man who dares to look the Devil in the face and tell him he is a Devil.
Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter.
A law is not a law without coercion behind it.
All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.
I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.
The President is the last person in the world to know what the people really want and think.
Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.
The chief duty of government is to keep the peace and stand out of the sunshine of the people.
The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.
There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.
If wrinkles must be written on our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
I have had many troubles in my life, but the worst of them never came.
Right reason is stronger than force.
Justice and goodwill will outlast passion.
The civil service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law.
A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.
I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty.
If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.
The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.
I am a poor hater.
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.
He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.
Suicide is not a remedy.
Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.
If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it.
Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.
Ideas control the world.
The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.
