Quotes from James A. Garfield

Eternity alone can reveal to the human race its debt of gratitude to the peerless and immortal name of Washington.

Poverty is uncomfortable but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.

I am not willing that this discussion should close without mention of the value of a true teacher. Give me a log hut, with only a simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other, and you may have all the buildings, apparatus and libraries without him.

Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.

History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.

The men who succeed best in public life are those who take the risk of standing by their own convictions.

The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.

There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It really matters very little whether they are behind the wheel of a truck or running a business or bringing up a family. The teach the truth by living it.

If wrinkles must be written on our brow, let them not be written on our heart. The spirit should not grow old.

We should do nothing for revenge, but everything for security: nothing for the past; everything for the present and the future.

There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.

Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.