People say time heals all wounds. Let me tell you, time heals nothing. You can do the wrong thing for 10 years and it doesn't equal the right thing for one day.
It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion
Governments 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.
When people are bewildered they tend to become credulous.
There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal.
I cannot think of anything characteristically American that was not produced by toil. I cannot think of any American man or woman preeminent in the history of our nation who did not reach their place through toil. I cannot think of anything that represents the American people as a whole so adequately as honest work.
A display of reason rather than a threat of force should be the determining factor in the intercourse among nations.
Man's greatest victory is over oneself.
I can't get mad about peoples' opinions, I always say that. That's their opinion. They got every right to say or think whatever they want to say and think. And whatever they say and think don't affect my life.
Disaffection stalks around us.
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.