To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.

It is not in violence and crime that our greatest danger lies. These evils are so perfectly apparent that they very quickly arouse the moral power of the people for their suppression. A far more serious danger lurks in the shirking of those responsibilities of citizenship, where the evil may not be so noticeable but is more insidious and likely to be more devastating.

The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. ... The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all.

[The political mind] is a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeurat another time. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse.

We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither.

The best help that benevolence and philanthropy can give is that which induces everybody to help himself.

I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm.