James A. Garfield Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!

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

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.

Ideas control the world.

A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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

Tortured for the Republic.

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.

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.