We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
I am the friend of peace and mean to preserve it for America so long as I am able. . . . No course of my choosing or of their (nations at war) will lead to war. War can come only by the wilful acts and aggressions of others.
A radical is one of whom people say ''He goes too far.'' A conservative, on the other hand, is one who ''doesn't go far enough.'' Then there is the reactionary, ''one who doesn't go at all.'' All these terms are more or less objectionable, wherefore we have
The allied nations with the fullest concurrence of our government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.
The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For...
things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.
Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.
Neutrality is a negative word. It is a word that does not express what America ought to feel. America has a heart, and that heart throbs with all sorts of intense sympathies... We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations upon which peace can be rebuilt.
No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.
We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency - clear disinterested thinking and fearless action
No man ever saw the people of whom he forms a part. No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States. Its personnel extends through all the nations, and across the seas, and into every corner of the world in the persons of the representatives of the United States in foreign
capitals and in foreign centres of commerce.
The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.
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.
I have received delegations of working men who, apparently speaking with the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship if they were deprived of their beer, for example.
Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.