I want the people to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry.
Calvin CoolidgeIf I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress.
Calvin CoolidgeWe need more of the Office Desk and less of the Show Window in politics. Let men in office substitute the midnight oil for the limelight.
Calvin CoolidgeGovernments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.
Calvin Coolidge