William Howard Taft Quotes
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I do not allow myself to be moved by anything except the law. If there has been a mistake in the law, or if I think there has beenperjury or injustice, I will weigh the petition most carefully, but I do not permit myself to be moved by more harrowing details, and I try to treat each case as if I was reviewing it or hearing it for the first time from the bench.
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Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you...take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.
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If they will play fair I will play fair, but if they won't then I reserve all my rights to do anything I find myself able to do.
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My impression about the Panama Canal is that the great revolution it is going to introduce in the trade of the world is in the trade between the east and the west coast of the United States.
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Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.
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There is no "but" in it. The way to be an administration Senator is to vote with the Administration.
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We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage.
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The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to the modern idea of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets.
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There is no legislation--I care not what it is--tariff, railroads, corporations, or of a general political character, that all equals in importance the putting of our banking and currency system on the sound basis proposed in the National Monetary Commission plan.
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As the Republican platforms says, the welfare of the farmer is vital to that of the whole country.
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I think it is a wise course for laborers to unite to defend their interests.... I think the employer who declines to deal with organized labor and to recognize it as a proper element in the settlement of wage controversies is behind the times.... Of course, when organized labor permits itself to sympathize with violent methods or undue duress, it is not entitled to our sympathy.
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One of the reforms to be carried out during the incoming administration is a change in our monetary and banking laws, so as to secure greater elasticity in the forms of currency available for trade and to prevent the limitations of law from operating to increase the embarrassment of a financial panic.
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I don't know the man I admire more than [Charles Evans] Hughes. If ever I have the chance I shall offer him the Chief Justiceship.
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The secret of Masonry, like the secret of life, can be known only by those who seek it, serve it, live it. It cannot be uttered; it can only be felt and acted. It is, in fact, an open secret, and each man knows it according to his quest and capacity. Like all things worth knowing, no one can know it for another and no man can know it alone.
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The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old "laissez faire" school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.
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The true Mason does not hold or teach the attitude that, I am a Master Mason now and thus I no longer need to be concerned with using the working tools because they were given in the earlier degrees.
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We shall have to begin all over again. [Taft hoped that] the Senators might change their minds, or that the people might change the Senate; instead of which they changed me.
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Rules of conduct which govern men in their relations to one another are being applied in an ever-increasing degree to nations. The battlefield as a place of settlement of disputes is gradually yielding to arbitral courts of justice.
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Don't worry over what the newspapers say. I don't. Why should anyone else? I told the truth to the newspaper correspondents - but when you tell the truth to them they are at sea.
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Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.
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Masonry aims at the promotion of morality and higher living by the cultivation of the social side of man, the rousing in him of the instincts of charity and love of his kind. It rests surely on the foundation of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.
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Anyone who has taken the oath I have just taken must feel a heavy weight of responsibility. If not, he has no conception of the powers and duties of the office.
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We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.
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I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk.