James A. Garfield Quotes - Page 3

[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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian - the humble listener - there has been a Divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come.

For love of country, they accepted death.

Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis. Conservatives have their place in the piping times of peace; but in emergencies only rugged issue men amount to much.

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

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.

We can not overestimate the fervent love of liberty, the intelligent courage, and the sum of common sense with which our fathers made the great experiment of self-government.

Suicide is not a remedy

Justice and goodwill will outlast passion.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.