Benjamin Harrison Quotes

It is often easier to assemble armies than it is to assemble army revenues.

The disfranchisement of a single legal elector by fraud or intimidation is a crime too grave to be regarded lightly.

I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man
or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.

If kittens turn into cats why don't puppies turn into paps?

Great lives never go out; they go on.

There never has been a time in our history when work was so abundant or when wages were as high, whether measured by the currency in which they are paid or by their power to supply the necessaries and comforts of life.

I am thorough believer in the American test of character. He will not build high who does not build for himself.

The bud of victory is always in the truth.

Will it not be wise to allow the friendship between nations to rest upon deep and permanent things? Irritations of the cuticle must not be confounded with heart failure.

Prayer steadies one when he is walking in slippery places - even if things asked for are not given.

That one flag encircles us with its folds today, the unrivaled object of our loyal love.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

No other people have a government more worthy of their respect and love or a land so magnificent in extent, so pleasant to look upon, and so full of generous suggestion to enterprise and labor.

I have never been able to think of the day as one of mourning; I have never quite been able to feel that half-masted flags were appropriate on Decoration Day. I have rather felt that the flag should be at the peak, because those whose dying we commemorate rejoiced in seeing it where their valor placed it. We honor them in a joyous, thankful, triumphant commemoration of what they did.

The indiscriminate denunciation of the rich is mischievous ... No poor man was ever made richer or happier by it. It is quite as illogical to despise a man because he is rich as because he is poor. Not what a man has, but what he is, settles his class. We can not right matters by taking from one what he has honestly acquired to bestow upon another what he has not earned.

If the educated and influential classes in a community either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that seem to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient cause for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes?

There is no constitutional or legal requirement that the President shall take the oath of office in the presence of the People but there is so manifest an appropriateness in the public induction to office of the chief executive officer of the nation that from the beginning of the Government the people to whose service the official oath consecrates the officer, have been called to witness the solemn ceremonial

This Government has found occasion to express, in a friendly spirit, but with much earnestness, to the Government of the Czar, its serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia.

In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure that the American conscience and the American love of liberty have not been smothered. They will break through this crust of sordidness and realize that those only keep their liberties who accord liberty to others.