“Christmas was an occasion of literally delirious joy… I never knew anyone else have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce them exactly for my own children.”

An Autobiography
1913

“It is not in the power of any human being to devise legislation or administration by which every man shall achieve success and have happiness; it not only is not in the power of any man to do that, but if any man says that he can do it, distrust him as a quack.”

Dallas, Texas
April 5, 1905

“There are two kinds of historians: one, the delver, the bricklayer, the man who laboriously gathers together bare facts; and the other, the builder, the architect, who out of these facts makes the great edifice of history. Both are indispensable; but it is only the latter who can be called an historian in the highest sense.”

Bookman
June 1897

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”

Chicago, Illinois
April 10, 1899

“[O]nly a very few great reforms or great measures of any kind can be carried through without concession.”

Atlantic Monthly
August 1894

“There is no class of our citizens, big or small, who so emphatically deserve well of the country as the officers and the enlisted men of the army and navy.”

New York Times
November 22, 1914

“It is impossible for a democracy to endure if the political lines are drawn to coincide with class lines.”

Century
January 1900

“I think we can say this much, Republicans have not always done well, but it will be an evil day when they do as badly as the Democrats.”

New York
October 28, 1882

“It often happens that the good conditions of the past can be regained, not by going back, but by going forward. We cannot recreate what is dead; we cannot stop the march of events; but we can direct this march, and out of the new conditions
develop something better than the past knew.”

The Outlook
August 27, 1910

“Never, never, you must never remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility.”

To reporters at New York Police Headquarters
November 1896

“It is always better to be an original than an imitation.”

Forum
April 1894