“An independent and upright judiciary which fearlessly stands for the right, even against popular clamor, but which also understands and sympathizes with popular needs, is a great asset of popular government.”

Columbus, Ohio
February 21, 1912

“Conservation means development as much as it does protection.”

Osawatomie, Kansas
August 31, 1910

“The demagogue, in all his forms, is as characteristic an evil of a
free society as the courtier is of a despotism.”

Forum
February 1895

“I believe in making it possible for every man or woman who really desires it to have a higher education, but that this shall be permissive and not obligatory.”

Baltimore, Maryland
September 28, 1918

“It is a great comfort to me to read the life and letters of Abraham Lincoln. I am more and more impressed every day, not only with the man’s wonderful power and sagacity, but with his literally endless patience, and at the same time his unflinching resolution.”

Letter to Kermit Roosevelt
October 2, 1903

“Public welfare depends upon general public prosperity, and the reformer whose reforms interfere with the general prosperity will accomplish little.”

The Outlook
November 18, 1914

“The vital thing for this nation to do is steadily to cultivate the quality which Washington and those under him so pre-eminently showed during the winter at Valley Forge – the quality of steady adherence to duty in the teeth of difficulty, in the teeth of discouragement, and even disaster, the quality that makes a man do what is straight and decent, not one day when a great crisis comes, but every day, day in and day out, until success comes at the end.”

at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania,
June 19, 1904

“It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.”

Berkeley, California
1911

“There is one quality which perhaps, strictly speaking, is as much intellectual as moral, but which is too often wholly lacking in men of high intellectual ability and without which real character cannot exist—namely, the fundamental gift of common sense.”

The Outlook
November 8, 1913

“No laws which the wit of man can devise will avail to make the community prosperous if the average individual lives in such fashion that his expenditures always exceed his income.”

The Outlook
October 5, 1912

“Unless this is in very truth a government of, by, and for the people, then both historically and in world interest our national existence loses most of its point.”

The Outlook
January 21, 1911