Quotes by Presidents - Page 6

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.
Thomas Jefferson
I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.
Abraham Lincoln
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment
Thomas Jefferson
Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
Thomas Jefferson
No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any.
Thomas Jefferson
The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes.
Thomas Jefferson
I am not bound to win but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed but I am bound to live up to what light I have.
Abraham Lincoln
It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine well his own opinion.
Thomas Jefferson
That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.
Abraham Lincoln
The care of human life and happiness, and their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of a good government.
Thomas Jefferson
As I would not be a slave so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
Abraham Lincoln
I am mortified to be told that in the United States of America the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry and of criminal inquiry too.
Thomas Jefferson
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln
Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
Thomas Jefferson
It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.
Thomas Jefferson
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office a rottenness begins in his conduct.
Thomas Jefferson
Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.
Abraham Lincoln
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. ... But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security...
Thomas Jefferson
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both *may* be, and one *must* be, wrong. God cannot be *for* and *against* the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party - and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaption to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true - that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either *saved* or *destroyed* the Union without human contest. Yet the contest began, And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
Abraham Lincoln
no people can be both ignorant and free.
Thomas Jefferson
Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.
Thomas Jefferson
I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
Abraham Lincoln
The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.
Thomas Jefferson
The democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man's right of property...This is a world of compensations; and he would -be- no slave must consent to -have- no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.All honor to Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. Your obedient Servant,[Abraham Lincoln]April 6, 1859, in a letter to MA State Rep Henry L. PierceSpringfield, Ill.
Abraham Lincoln
Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one. This is a most valuable and sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.
Abraham Lincoln
For God's sake let us freely hear both sides!
Thomas Jefferson
My country ... gave me schooling independence of action and opportunity for service. ... I am indebted to my country beyond any human power to repay.
Herbert Hoover
He [Weishaupt] says, no one ever laid a surer foundation for liberty than our grand master, Jesus of Nazareth.
Thomas Jefferson
Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
Thomas Jefferson
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before.
Herbert Hoover
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Thomas Jefferson
Let no guilty man escape if it can be avoided. No personal consideration should stand in the way of performing a public duty.
Ulysses S. Grant
Let us have faith that Right makes Might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Abraham Lincoln
I cannot live without books.
Thomas Jefferson
If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
Thomas Jefferson
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans and must be that of every free state.
Thomas Jefferson
I am not concerned that you have fallen -- I am concerned that you arise.
Abraham Lincoln
Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
Thomas Jefferson
All I have learned, I learned from books.
Abraham Lincoln
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot retain it.
Abraham Lincoln
We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and more; you can go home and try to bring the people to your views, and you may say anything you like about me, if that will help... When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost my life.
Abraham Lincoln
Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.
Abraham Lincoln
It is my pleasure that my children are free and happy and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.
Abraham Lincoln
If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.
Thomas Jefferson
Important principles may and must be flexible.
Abraham Lincoln
We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. -Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854.
Abraham Lincoln
I have found that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln
Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Abraham Lincoln
In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.
Abraham Lincoln
To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.
John Quincy Adams
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.
Thomas Jefferson
Enlighten the people, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Thomas Jefferson
If they do kill me I shall never die another death.
Abraham Lincoln
I'm a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn't have the heart to let him down.
Abraham Lincoln
Determine that the thing can and shall be done and then... find the way.
Abraham Lincoln
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
Abraham Lincoln
I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.
Thomas Jefferson
No one knows, and few conceive, the agony of mind that I have suffered from the time that I was made by circumstances, and not by my volition, a candidate for the Presidency till I was dismissed from that station by the failure of my election.
John Quincy Adams
No man is poor who has a Godly mother.
Abraham Lincoln