All quotes

There are some days when we need a hand. There are other days when we're called on to lend one.

We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.

The right to dissent peaceably, within the guardrails of our Republic, is perhaps our nation's greatest strength.

We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.

In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.

It is their power and majesty that is reflected, and only for their good, in every legitimate government, under whatever form it may appear.

If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information, and benevolence.

Can authority be more amiable and respectable when it descends from accidents or institutions established in remote antiquity than when it springs fresh from the hearts and judgments of an honest and enlightened people?

The existence of such a government as ours for any length of time is a full proof of a general dissemination of knowledge and virtue throughout the whole body of the people.

Nature loves such woods, and places her own seal upon them.

The emotions excited by the songs of these thrushes belong to a higher order, springing as they do from our deepest sense of the beauty and harmony of the world.

The greatness and the minuteness of nature pass all understanding.

Every artist does something more than copy Nature; more comes out in his account than goes into the original experience.

Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.

In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience.

Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession.

ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.

For he that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read but the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced of the contrary.

Want of a common judge with authority, puts all men in a state of nature: force without right, upon a man's person, makes a state of war

No body can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.

Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another's harm

As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.