The quote database

One must not avoid one's tests, although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves and before no other judge.

One must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is destined for independence and command, and do so at the right time.

The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy.

With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

We have more will than wallet; but will is what we need.

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

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

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

The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.

The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.

The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.

I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself.

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.

Your every voter, as surely as your Chief Magistrate, under the same high sanction, though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust.

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

The Constitution expresses more than the conviction of the people that democratic processes must be preserved at all costs.

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will.

I would ten thousand times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way.

As I look back on my struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would come of the undertaking, or I should surely have failed.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process.

Every struggle is a victory.

If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep.