There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great. Such a time has come, and in the Providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show the world that she was born to save mankind.
My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, itwill turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all freedomthat America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.
No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all- disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report.
If you would be a leader of men you must lead your own generation, not the next. Your playing must be good now, while the play ison the boards and the audience in the seats.... It will not get you the repute of a good actor to have excellencies discovered in you afterwards.
When you have read the Bible, you will know it is the word of God, because you will have found it the key to your own heart, your own happiness and your own duty.
Let me... remind you that it is only by working with an energy which is almost superhuman and which looks to uninterested spectators like insanity that we can accomplish anything worth the achievement. Work is the keystone of a perfect life. Work and trust in God.
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
Man is much more than a 'rational being' and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing natures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning.
We forget that there is much more patriotism in having the audacity to differ from the majority than in running before the crowd; we forget that in the resistance of the minority some of the biggest things in our own history have been accomplished, and the man who looks on the Stars and Stripes and doesn't hold a right to say nay to his neighbor, even if the neighbor is of the larger party, has forgotten the history of his country.
There is no indispensable man. The government will not collapse and go to pieces if any one of the gentlemen who are seeking to be entrusted with its guidance should be left at home.
I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.
The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.
I believe very profoundly in an over-ruling Providence, and I do not fear that any real plans can be thrown off the track. It maynot be intended that I shall be President--but that would not break my heart.