James A. Garfield quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by James A. Garfield

James A. Garfield Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from James A. Garfield on Wise Famous Quotes.

To all our means of culture is added the powerful incentive to personal ambition, no post of honor is so high but the poorest may hope to reach it.

Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.

The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.

Of course I deprecate war, but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home.

We are apt to be deluded into false security by political catch-words, devised to flatter rather than instruct.

Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear, like owls and bats, before the light of day.

Commerce links all mankind in one common brotherhood of mutual dependence and interests.

I am a poor hater.

It is not right or manly to lie even about Satan.

Heroes did not make our liberties; they but reflected and illustrated them.

The possession of great powers no doubt carries with it a comtempt for mere external show

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

There are some things I am afraid of: I am afraid to do a mean thing.

Tortured for the Republic.

A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.

History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

Ideas control the world.

They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that the United States is a giant without bones. Since that time our gristle has been rapidly hardening.

History is constantly repeating itself, making only such changes of programme as the growth of nations and centuries requires.

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.

Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.

I so despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme.

But for we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare ... are to be found portrayed in it.

Honesty is the best policy, says the familiar axiom; but people who are honest on that principle defraud no one but themselves.

I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error.

If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.

I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing. I dread nothing so much as falling into a rut and feeling myself becoming a fossil.

My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?

Suicide is not a remedy.

It is a brave man ... who dares to look the devil in the face and tell him he is a devil.

A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty.

Mankind have been slow to believe that order reigns in the universe-that the world is a cosmos and a chaos.

When the shadow of the Presidential and Congressional election is lifted we shall, I hope to be in a better temper to legislate.

Whatever I may believe in theology, I do not believe in the doctrine of vicarious atonement in politics.

[Science] is the literature of God written on the stars-the trees-the rocks-and more important because [of] its marked utilitarian character.

Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe,
human or divine. A law is not law without coercion behind it.

The people are responsible for the character of their Congress.

True art is but the anti-type of nature; the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility.

No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech.

Right reason is stronger than force.

The President is the last person in the world to know what the people really want and think.

I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.

The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.

God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

I would rather believe something and suffer for it, than to slide along into success without opinions.

A noble life crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth.

Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality.

I believe in God, and I trust myself in His hands.

I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike.

The civil service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law.

We should do nothing for revenge, but everything for security: nothing for the past; everything for the present and the future.

Justice and goodwill will outlast passion.

The right of private judgment is absolute in every American citizen.

Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis.

Emember that under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship.

He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.

If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it.

I have had many troubles in my life, but the worst of them never came.

In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands.

For mere vengeance I would do nothing. This nation is too great to look for mere revenge. But for security of the future I would do every thing.

I will not vote against the truths of the multiplication table.

The return to solid values is always hard ... Distress, panic, and hard times have marked our pathway in returning to solid values.

I found a kind of party terrorism pervading and oppressing the minds of our best men.

For the love of country they accepted death.

The chief duty of government is to keep the peace and stand out of the sunshine of the people.

If wrinkles must be written on our brow, let them not be written on our heart. The spirit should not grow old.

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.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.