James A. Garfield Quotes (38 Quotes)

If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

A university is a student on one end of a pine log and Mark Hopkins president of Williams College on the other.

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

History is the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification. They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

I have had many troubles in my life, but the worst of them never came.

If wrinkles must be written on our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

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

Ideas control the world.

Right reason is stronger than force.

Suicide is not a remedy.

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

Poverty is uncomfortable but 9 times out of 10 the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and be compelled to sink or swim.

The chief duty of government is to keep the peace and stand out of the sunshine of the people.

The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.

I am a poor hater.

A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.

I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike.

Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis.

Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.

I have had many troubles, but the worst of them never came.

He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.

Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.

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

I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.

Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.

Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.

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

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

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

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

Justice and goodwill will outlast passion.

If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it.

Poverty is uncomfortable; 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.