I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.

A sure sign of an amateur is too much detail to compensate for too little life.

If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig.

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.

We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.

You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand

It is not an army that we must train for war; it is a nation.