James A. Garfield Quotes

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

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.

For the love of country they accepted death.

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

Now more than ever the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It really matters very little whether they are behind the wheel of a truck or running a business or bringing up a family. The teach the truth by living it.

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

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

God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!

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

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

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.

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.

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 divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.

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.

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

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

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

I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that i may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Justice and goodwill will outlast passion.

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.

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

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

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

Tortured for the Republic.

[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.

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

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

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.

A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.

A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.

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

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

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

Men are tending to materialism. Houses, lands, and worldly goods attract their attention, and as a mirage lure them on to death. Christianity, on the other hand leads only the natural body to death, and for the spirit, it points out a house not built with hands, eternal in the heavens ... Let me urge you to follow Him, not as the Nazarene, the Man of Galilee, the carpenter's son, but as the ever living spiritual person, full of love and compassion, who will stand by you in life and death and eternity.

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.

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

I am receiving what I suppose to be the usual number of threatening letters on the subject. Assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning; it is best not to worry about either.

Ideas control the world.

History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

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

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.