“I fight when I am attacked.”

New York City Hall, May 5, 1896

“Honesty we must have;  no brilliance, no ‘smartness,’ can take its place.”

New York City, October 5, 1898

“There is no use in trying to rally around the past … If the Republican Party takes the ground that the world must be the same old world, the Republican Party is lost.”

Letter to Will H. Hayes, May 15, 1918

“The man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic – the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.”

New York, 1891

“If we had no party allegiance, our politics would become mere windy anarchy, and, under present conditions, our government could hardly continue at all.”

Atlantic Monthly, August 1894

“There can be no greater mistake from the democratic point of view, nothing more ruinous can be imagined from the point of view of a true democracy, than to believe that democracy means absence of leadership.”

New York City, November 16, 1916

“Reformers must carefully plan how and what they are to construct before they tear down what exists.”

The Wisconsin Idea, 1912

“To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty or conscience which is one of the foundations of American life.”

Letter to J. C. Martin, November 6, 1908

“Our greatest statesmen have always been those who believed in the nation – who had faith in the power of our people to spread until they should become the mightiest among the peoples of the world.”

The Strenuous Life, 1900

“Labor organizations are like other organizations, like organizations of capitalists; sometimes they act very well and sometimes they act very badly. We should consistently favor them when they act well, and as fearlessly oppose them when they act badly.”

Berkeley, California, March 23, 1911

“We do not, as a people, suffer from lack of criticism, but we do suffer from the lack of impartial and intelligent criticism.”

Century, February 1890