The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.

America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.

My own ideals for the university are those of a genuine democracy and serious scholarship. These two, indeed, seem to go together.

They [the children] live in a world of delightful imagination; they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly,--and these stupid [grown-up people] try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.

The seed of revolution is repression.

I have had the accomplishment of something like this at heart ever since I was a boy.... So I feel tonight like the man who is lodging happily in the inn which lies half way along the journey and that in time, with a fresh impulse, we shall go the rest of the journey and sleep at the journey's end like men with a quiet conscience.

No man has ever risen to the stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.