The quote database

The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy.

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

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.

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.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

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

Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

We have more will than wallet; but will is what we need.

There are times when the future seems thick as a fog; you sit and wait, hoping the mists will lift and reveal the right path.

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.

Great nations like great men must keep their word.

A President is neither prince nor pope, and I don't seek a window on men's souls.

There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

We must show courage in a time of blessing by confronting problems instead of passing them on to future generations.

We find the fullness of life not only in options, but in commitments.

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.

Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.

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.

it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected

A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.

The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.