Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
The roll of honor consists of the names of meant who have squared their conduct by ideals of duty.
We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.
I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has.
When met with a problem I always ask myself what is the right thing to do and then I do it.
Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out.
So many figures are quoted to prove so many things. Sometimes it depends on what paper you read or what broadcast you listen in on.
While my interest in natural history has added very little to my sum of achievement, it has added immeasurably to my sum of enjoyment in life.
Repeal the Missouri Compromise - repeal all compromises - repeal the Declaration of Independence - repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man's heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.
Understanding is the soil in which grow all the fruits of friendship.
Death is always, under all circumstances, a tragedy, for if it is not then it means that life has become one.
It's in your hands to make the world a better place.
One is a majority if he is right.
Public opinion in this country is everything.
In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.
Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.
Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.
No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.
Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.
Music is a great blessing. It has the power to elevate and liberate us. It sets people free to dream. It can unite us to sing with one voice. Such is the value of music.
We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.
It is better to swallow words than to have to eat them later.
No government has ever been beneficent when the attitude of government was that it was taking care of the people. The only freedom consists in the people taking care of the government.
There are good men and bad men of all nationalities, creeds and colors; and if this world of ours is ever to become what we hope some day it may become, it must be by the general recognition that the man's heart and soul, the man's worth and actions, determine his standing.
...I do not mean to say that this general government is charged with the duty of redressing or preventing all the wrongs in the world; but I do think that it is charged with the duty of preventing and redressing all wrongs which are wrongs to itself.
I told my cellmates about the oppression of the whites and apartheid. I helped organize hunger strikes and the like in my prison.
What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?
The farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself.
To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.
The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.
So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.
The time comes in the life of any nation when there remains only two choices - submit or fight.
Work hard at work worth doing.
It is a pleasure to be able to quote lines to fit any occasion.
Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.
One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called ''weasel words.'' When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a ''weasel word'' after another there is nothing left of the other.
Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much.
We have beaten the living, but we cannot fight the dead.
Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false... In most instances, they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.
The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.
Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.
Leaders will have to give clear and decisive leadership towards a world of tolerance and respect for difference, and an uncompromising commitment to peaceful solutions of conflicts and disputes.
The first requisite of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight; that he shall not be a mere passenger, but shall do his share in the work that each generation of us finds ready to hand; and, furthermore, that in doing his work he shall show, not only the capacity for sturdy self-help, but also self-respecting regard for the rights of others.
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits-the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.
Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.
A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall. So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey which catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the highroad to his reason.
Water is a commodity not by any means to be found everywhere...When found, it is more than likely to be bad, being either from a bitter alkaline pool, or from a hole in a creek, so muddy that it can only be called liquid by courtesy.
Great power involves great responsibility
Adhere to your purpose and you will soon feel as well as you ever did. On the contrary, if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power of keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life.
We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.
I am ... willing to make it clear that American foreign policy must uphold the sanctity of international treaties. That is the cornerstone on which all relations between nations must rest.
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.
There is nothing more practical than the preservation of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions of mankind
Why don't you laugh? If I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.
What I seek is the highest possible batting average.
If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful.
Every one at the bottom of his heart cherishes vanity; even the toad thinks himself good-looking,--"rather tawny perhaps, but look at his eye!
It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.
Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.
