 A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible. |
| Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world. |
| The history of liberty is a history of resistance. |
| Tell me what is right and I will fight for it. |
| One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. |
| Property as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place. |
| 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 growing or swelling. |
| The world is not looking for servants, there are plenty of these, but for masters, men who form their purposes and then carry them out, let the consequences be what they may. |
| Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. |
| You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape. |
| Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself. |
| The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. |
| 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. |
| Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles. |
| He is not a true man of the world who knows only the present fashions of it. |
| That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic. |
| A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits. |
| You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. |
| If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing. |
| Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt. |
