We're children. We're supposed to be childish.
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retributions.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
The most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can't get inside and know the subject.
I don't do the things other people call "play. "
Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help.
My fellow citizens, the American Presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery.