James A. Garfield's Quotes

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

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

Right reason is stronger than force.

Suicide is not a remedy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I am a poor hater.

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

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

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

Ideas control the world.

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

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

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

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

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