James A. Garfield Quotations

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

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

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

Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter.

A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.

The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.

Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.

If wrinkles must be written on our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

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

Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.

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

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

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A law is not a law without coercion behind it....

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

Poverty is uncomfortable; but 9 times out of 10 the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and be compelled to sink or swim.

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

[I]t would be unjust to our people and dangerous to our institutions to apply any portion of revenues of the nation or of the States to the support of sectarian schools.

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.

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

Suicide is not a remedy

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

History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.

The chief instrument of American statistics is the census, which should accomplish a two-fold object. It should serve the country by making a full and accurate exhibit of the elements of national life and strength, and it should serve the science of statistics by so exhibiting general results that they may be compared with similar data obtained by other nations.

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.

The worst days of darkness through which I have ever passed have been greatly alleviated by throwing myself with all my energy into some work relating to others.

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

It would convert the Treasury of the United States into a manufactory of paper money. It makes the House of Representatives and the Senate, or the caucus of the party which happens to be in the majority, the absolute dictator of the financial and business affairs of this country. This scheme surpasses all the centralism and all the Caesarism that were ever charged upon the Republican party in the wildest days of the war or in the events growing out of the war.

The prosperity which now prevails is without parallel in our history. Fruitful seasons have done much to secure it, but they have not done all. The preservation of the public credit and the resumption of specie payments, so successfully attained by the Administration of my predecessors, have enabled our people to secure the blessings which the seasons brought.

The refunding of the national debt at a lower rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of the national-bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country.

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

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

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

Tortured for the Republic.

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

The people are responsible for the character of their Congress.

I admitted, that the world had existed millions of years. I am astonished at the ignorance of the masses on these subjects. Hugh Miller has it right when he says that 'the battle of evidences must now be fought on the field of the natural sciences.'

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

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

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

Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification.

Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.

For honest merit to succeed amid the tricks and intrigues which are now so lamentably common, I know is difficult; but the honor of success is increased by the obstacles which are to be surmounted. Let me triumph as a man or not at all.

History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

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

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.

In my judgment, while it is the duty of Congress to respect to the uttermost the conscientious convictions and religious scruples of every citizen ... not any ecclesiastical organization can be safely permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the national government.

The divorce between church and state should be absolute.

I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.

Statistical science is indispensable to modern statesmanship. In legislation as in physical science it is beginning to be understood that we can control terrestrial forces only by obeying their laws. The legislator must formulate in his statutes not only the national will, but also those great laws of social life revealed by statistics.

You and I are now nearly in middle age, and have not yet become soured and shrivelled with the wear and tear of life. Let us pray to be delivered from that condition where life and nature have no fresh, sweet sensations for us.

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

Monuments may be builded to express the affection or pride of friends, or to display their wealth, but they are only valuable for the characters which they perpetuate.

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

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

Wherever a ship ploughs the sea, or a plough furrows the field; wherever a mine yields its treasure; wherever a ship or a railroad train carries freight to market; wherever the smoke of the furnace rises, or the clang of the loom resounds; even in the lonely garret where the seamstress plies her busy needle--there is industry.

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

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

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

There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the beatings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite.

When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose-tree the rose.

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

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

In the minds of most men, the kingdom of opinion is divided into three territories,--the territory of yes, the territory of no, and a broad, unexplored middle ground of doubt.

Real political issues cannot be manufactured by the leaders of political parties, and real ones cannot be evaded by political parties. The real political issues of the day declare themselves, and come out of the depths of that deep which we call public opinion.

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

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

Power exhibits itself under two distinct forms,--strength and force,--each possessing peculiar qualities, and each perfect in its own sphere. Strength is typified by the oak, the rock, the mountain. Force embodies itself in the cataract, the tempest, and the thunder-bolt.

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

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

Individuals may wear for a time the glory of our institutions, but they carry it not to the grave with them. Like raindrops from heaven, they may pass through the circle of the shining bow and add to its luster; but when they have sunk in the earth again, the proud arch still spans the sky and shines gloriously on.

At present, the most valuable gift which can be bestowed upon women is something to do which they can do well and worthily, and thereby maintain themselves.

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

The separation of Church and State in everything relating to taxation should be absolute.

It is not part of the functions of the national government to find employment for people and if we were to appropriate a hundred millions for this purpose, we should be taxing forty millions of people to keep a few thousand employed.

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

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

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

A nation is not worthy to be saved if, in the hour of its fate, it will not gather up all its jewels of manhood and life, and go down into the conflict however bloody and doubtful, resolved on measureless ruin or complete success.

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.

The best system of education is that which draws its chief support from the voluntary effort of the community, from the individual efforts of citizens, and from those burdens of taxation which they voluntarily impose upon themselves.

It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.

We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them.

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

[It is possible] that the race of red men ... will, before many generations, be remembered only as a strange, weird, dream-like specter, which has passed once before the eyes of men, but had departed forever.

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