Every man who takes office in Washington either grows or swells, and when I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing. The mischief of it is that when they swell, they do not swell enough to burst.

Property as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place.

The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.

At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.

If you would be a leader of men, you must lead your own generation, not the next.

I have received delegations of working men who, apparently speaking with the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship if they were deprived of their beer, for example.

Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.