James A. Garfield Quotes
-
Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis.
-
No federal legislation prior to 1812 placed any restriction on the right of suffrage in consequence of the color of the citizen. From 1789 to 1812 Congress passed ten separate laws establishing new Territories. In all these, freedom, and not color, was the basis of suffrage.
-
The House has today resolved to enter upon a revolution against the Constitution and Government of the United States... Nothing less than the total subversion of this government.
-
The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.
-
If wrinkles must be written on our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
-
I will not vote against the truths of the multiplication table.
-
I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.
-
The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.
-
I have always said that my whole public life was an experiment to determine whether an intelligent people would sustain a man in acting sensibly on each proposition that arose, and in doing nothing for mere show or demagogical effect.
-
I would rather be defeated than make capital out of my religion.
-
Come down the glorious steps of our banner. Every great record we have made we have vindicated with our blood and with our truth. It sweeps the ground, and it touches the stars. Come here, young man, and put in your young life where all is living, and where nothing is dead but the heroes that defended it.
-
The great Carlyle has said that the best gift God ever gave to man was an eye that could really see; I venture to add that an equally rare and not less important gift is the courage to tell what one sees.
-
The lesson of History is rarely learned by the actors themselves.
-
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.
-
If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.
-
No American has carried greater fame out of the White House than this silent man who leaves it today.
-
My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?
-
Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter.
-
The possession of great powers, no doubt, carries with it a contempt for mere external show.
-
Enterprises of the highest importance to our moral and material well-being unite us and offer ample employment of our best powers. Let all our people, leaving behind them the battlefields of dead issues, move forward and in their strength of liberty and the restored Union win the grander victories of peace.
-
There never can be a convention... that shall bind my vote against my will on any question whatever.
-
Not in Chicago, in the heat of June, but at the ballot-boxes of the Republic, in the quiet of November, after the silence of deliberate judgment, will this question be settled. And now, gentlemen of the Convention, what do we want?
-
Tell her I am seriously hurt; how seriously I cannot yet say. I am myself, and hope she will come to me soon. I send my love to her.
-
The supreme trial of the Constitution came at last under the tremendous pressure of civil war. We ourselves are witnesses that the Union emerged from the blood and fire of that conflict purified and made stronger for all the beneficent purposes of good government.