You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.
There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great. Such a time has come, and in the Providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show the world that she was born to save mankind.
No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.
God knows that any man who would seek the presidency of the United States is a fool for his pains. The burden is all but intolerable, and the things that I have to do are just as much as the human spirit can carry.
I have come slowly into possession of such powers as I have. I receive the opinions of my day. I do not conceive them. But I receive them into a vivid mind.
The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow-citizens . Nothing chills nonsense like exposure to the air.
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.
From the dim morning hours of history when the father was king and priest down to this modern time of history's high noon when nations stand forth full grown and self-governed, the law of coherence and continuity in political development has suffered no serious breach.
I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticize their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.
And while you bring all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other countries behind you - bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them.
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness.