The quote database

Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights--then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward.

Preeminently, the power of our advocacy reposes in our example; but no example, be it remembered, can be powerful for lasting good, whatever apparent advantages may be gained, which is not based upon eternal principles of right and justice.

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.

The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder.

This close, intimate, personal cooperation between the management and the men is of the essence of modern scientific or task management.

In place of the suspicious watchfulness and the more or less open warfare which characterizes the ordinary types of management, there is universally friendly cooperation between the management and the men.

The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.

Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected

It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans.

With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

We must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood and town better than he found it.

The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born.

America has never been united by blood or birth or soil.

I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character.

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.

Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian.

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.

the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

A man must understand evil and be acquainted with sorrow before he can write himself an optimist and expect others to believe that he has reason for the faith that is in him.

Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things.

It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.