What is at the heart of all national problems? It is that we have seen the hand of material interest sometimes about to close upon our dearest rights and possessions.
The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in actiona nationthat neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.
Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.
The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared for him-not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.
Be militant! Be an organization that is going to do things! If you can find older men who will give you countenance and acceptableleadership, follow them; but if you cannot, organize separately and dispense with them. There are only two sorts of men to be associated with when something is to be done: Those are young men and men who never grow old.
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.
Benevolence does not consist in those who are prosperous pitying and helping those who are not. It consists in fellow feeling that puts you upon actually the same level with the fellow who suffers.
The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one's mind with other men's thoughts is to have no thoughts of one's own.