Rutherford B. Hayes Quotes

The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.

My father and mother in 1817 were forty-nine days on the road with their emigrant wagons [from Vermont] to Ohio. More than two days for each hour that I spent in the same journey.

My ambition for station was always easily controlled. If the place came to me it was welcome. But it never seemed to me worth seeking at the cost of self-respect, or independence. My family were not historic; they were well-to-do, did not hold or seek office. It was easy for me to be contented in private life. An honor was no honor to me, if obtained by my own seeking.

Do not let your bachelor ways crystallize so that you can't soften them when you come to have a wife and a family of your own.

It will be the duty of the Executive, with sufficient appropriations for the purpose, to prosecute unsparingly all who have been engaged in depriving citizens of the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution.

The religion of the Bible is the best in the world. I see the infinite value of religion. Let it be always encouraged. A world ofsuperstition and folly have grown up around its forms and ceremonies. But the truth in it is one of the deep sentiments in human nature.

Perhaps the happiest moment of my life was then, when I saw that our line didn't break and that the enemy's did.

We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.

As friends go it is less important to live.

I would honor the man who give to his country a good newspaper.

It is a government by the corporations, for the corporations.

Let every man, every corporation, and especially let every village, town, and city, every county and State, get out of debt and keep out of debt. It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times.

[T]his free and easy old-bachelor sort of life is quite full of fun and jollity. Pease and myself room together; and everything like order and neatness is banished from our presence as a nuisance--old letters and old boots and shoes, duds clean and duds dirty, books and newspapers, tooth-brushes, shoe-brushes, and clothes-brushes, all heaped together on chairs, settees, etc., in dusty and "most admired confusion." Now, what is there imaginable in clean, tidy private life equal to this?

I am not liked as a President by the politicians in office, in the press, or in Congress. But I am content to abide the judgment - the sober second thought - of the people.

Evening attend two "fandangos." Girls not very pretty but exceedingly graceful. [You] pay a dime for a figure and refreshments foryour doxy, who instead of eating prudently stores her cakes, etc., in a basket to be taken home for the family.