The quote database

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people.

We must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood and town better than he found it.

The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born.

We must show courage in a time of blessing by confronting problems instead of passing them on to future generations.

We find the fullness of life not only in options, but in commitments.

I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character.

it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected

Every citizen owes to the country a vigilant watch and close scrutiny of its public servants and a fair and reasonable estimate of their fidelity and usefulness.

Our mission is not punishment, but the rectification of wrong.

Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you truthfully what I suffered in slavery.

In this time of doubt, they look to the United States as never before for good will, strength, and wise leadership.

My share in the work of the world may be limited; but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

It is my service to think how I can best fulfil the demands that each day makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot.

The optimist cannot fall back, cannot falter; for he knows his neighbor will be hindered by his failure to keep in line.

Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward habitually at an elevated angle, it is as it were redeemed.

How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived

Surely civilization is old enough, surely mankind is mature enough so that we ought in our own lifetime to find a way to permanent peace.

There is no short road to the realization of these aspirations.

It is not down in any map; true places never are

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.