The quote database

The oath taken in the presence of the people becomes a mutual covenant.

No political party can long pursue advantage at the expense of public honor or by rude and indecent methods without protest and fatal disaffection in its own body.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Not from space must I seek my dignity, but from the ruling of my thought.

I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.

Ever since then I have had no patience with any school for my race in the South which did not teach its students the dignity of labour.

I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

Your life will be wasted if you go away from here and have not learned that the greatest lesson of all is the lesson of brotherly love, of usefulness and of charity.

There is a vast difference between working and being worked.

The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together.

Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil.

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.

The suspension of one man's dividends is the suspension of another man's pay envelope.

The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat.

The whole theory of our institutions is based on the liberty and independence of the individual.

Resolution is an act of courage in single instances, and if it becomes a characteristic trait, it is a habit of the mind.

The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with offical misconduct.

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

As the racial distinction of humanity lies in its social relation, so we find the distinctive gains and losses of humanity to lie also in its social relation. We are more affected by our relation to each other than by our physical environment.

Economic independence is a relative condition at best.

The basic condition of human life is union; the organic social relation, the interchange of functional service, wherein the individual is most advantaged, not by his own exertions for his own goods, but by the exchange of his exertions with the exertions of others for goods produced by them together.

The progress of society rests upon the increasing collectivity of human labor.

The inevitable trend of human life is toward higher civilization.

That any living woman should prefer it to home and husband, to love and motherhood, throws a fierce light on what women must have suffered for lack of freedom before.

For the fourth time the officer elected by the people and ordained by the Constitution to fill a vacancy so created is called to assume the Executive chair.