James A. Garfield Quotes

A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

Justice and goodwill will outlast passion.

Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe,--human or divine. A law is not law without coercion behind it.

The separation of Church and State in everything relating to taxation should be absolute.

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

Monuments may be builded to express the affection or pride of friends, or to display their wealth, but they are only valuable for the characters which they perpetuate.

The possession of great powers no doubt carries with it a comtempt for mere external show

The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.

History is constantly repeating itself, making only such changes of programme as the growth of nations and centuries requires.

The civil service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law.

The divorce between church and state should be absolute.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Mankind have been slow to believe that order reigns in the universe-that the world is a cosmos and a chaos.

The worst days of darkness through which I have ever passed have been greatly alleviated by throwing myself with all my energy into some work relating to others.

In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands.

Honesty is the best policy, says the familiar axiom; but people who are honest on that principle defraud no one but themselves.

There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.

Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis. Conservatives have their place in the piping times of peace; but in emergencies only rugged issue men amount to much.

The President is the last person in the world to know what the people really want and think.

But for we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare... are to be found portrayed in it.

The refunding of the national debt at a lower rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of the national-bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country.

Tortured for the Republic.

Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that the United States is a giant without bones. Since that time our gristle has been rapidly hardening.

No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech.

At present, the most valuable gift which can be bestowed upon women is something to do which they can do well and worthily, and thereby maintain themselves.

They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!

History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?

To all our means of culture is added the powerful incentive to personal ambition, no post of honor is so high but the poorest may hope to reach it.

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

[Science] is the literature of God written on the stars-the trees-the rocks-and more important because [of] its marked utilitarian character.

True art is but the anti-type of nature; the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility.

When the shadow of the Presidential and Congressional election is lifted we shall, I hope to be in a better temper to legislate.

Heroes did not make our liberties; they but reflected and illustrated them.

I found a kind of party terrorism pervading and oppressing the minds of our best men.

When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose-tree the rose.

A noble life crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth.

Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality.

Whatever I may believe in theology, I do not believe in the doctrine of vicarious atonement in politics.

There are some things I am afraid of: I am afraid to do a mean thing.

Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.

Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear, like owls and bats, before the light of day.

..remember that under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship.

The truth will set you free but first it will make you miserable.

Nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.

Man cannot live by bread alone he must have peanut butter.

Poverty is uncomfortable as I can testify: but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for himself.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.

It is a brave man... who dares to look the devil in the face and tell him he is a devil.