James A. Garfield Quotes & Sayings

#1. I believe in God, and I trust myself in His hands.

James A. Garfield

#2. God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!

James A. Garfield

#3. I am a poor hater.

James A. Garfield

#4. Tortured for the Republic.

James A. Garfield

#5. At present, the most valuable gift which can be bestowed upon women is something to do which they can do well and worthily, and thereby maintain themselves.

James A. Garfield

#6. The President is the last person in the world to know what the people really want and think.

James A. Garfield

#7. A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

James A. Garfield

#8. Heroes did not make our liberties; they but reflected and illustrated them.

James A. Garfield

#9. The chief duty of government is to keep the peace and stand out of the sunshine of the people.

James A. Garfield

#10. Ideas control the world.

James A. Garfield

#11. True art is but the anti-type of nature; the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility.

James A. Garfield

#12. Of course I deprecate war, but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home.

James A. Garfield

#13. I would rather believe something and suffer for it, than to slide along into success without opinions.

James A. Garfield

#14. In my judgment, while it is the duty of Congress to respect to the uttermost the conscientious convictions and religious scruples of every citizen ... not any ecclesiastical organization can be safely permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the national government.

James A. Garfield

#15. 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.

James A. Garfield

#16. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.

James A. Garfield

#17. For mere vengeance I would do nothing. This nation is too great to look for mere revenge. But for security of the future I would do every thing.

James A. Garfield

#18. For the love of country they accepted death.

James A. Garfield

#19. There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.

James A. Garfield

#20. A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.

James A. Garfield

#21. Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

James A. Garfield

#22. The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.

James A. Garfield

#23. Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality.

James A. Garfield

#24. We are apt to be deluded into false security by political catch-words, devised to flatter rather than instruct.

James A. Garfield

#25. Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.

James A. Garfield

#26. We can not overestimate the fervent love of liberty, the intelligent courage, and the sum of common sense with which our fathers made the great experiment of self-government.

James A. Garfield

#27. Commerce links all mankind in one common brotherhood of mutual dependence and interests.

James A. Garfield

#28. Now more than ever the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.

James A. Garfield

#29. Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

James A. Garfield

#30. When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose-tree the rose.

James A. Garfield

#31. Suicide is not a remedy.

James A. Garfield

#32. I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.

James A. Garfield

#33. It is a brave man ... who dares to look the devil in the face and tell him he is a devil.

James A. Garfield

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

James A. Garfield

#35. Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

James A. Garfield

#36. In the minds of most men, the kingdom of opinion is divided into three territories,
the territory of yes, the territory of no, and a broad, unexplored middle ground of doubt.

James A. Garfield

#37. There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the beatings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite.

James A. Garfield

#38. I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error.

James A. Garfield

#39. It is not part of the functions of the national government to find employment for people and if we were to appropriate a hundred millions for this purpose, we should be taxing forty millions of people to keep a few thousand employed.

James A. Garfield

#40. They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

James A. Garfield

#41. I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing. I dread nothing so much as falling into a rut and feeling myself becoming a fossil.

James A. Garfield

#42. I am receiving what I suppose to be the usual number of threatening letters on the subject. Assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning; it is best not to worry about either.

James A. Garfield

#43. Emember that under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship.

James A. Garfield

#44. The worst days of darkness through which I have ever passed have been greatly alleviated by throwing myself with all my energy into some work relating to others.

James A. Garfield

#45. Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.

James A. Garfield

#46. [Science] is the literature of God written on the stars-the trees-the rocks-and more important because [of] its marked utilitarian character.

James A. Garfield

#47. Whatever I may believe in theology, I do not believe in the doctrine of vicarious atonement in politics.

James A. Garfield

#48. The people are responsible for the character of their Congress.

James A. Garfield

#49. Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.

James A. Garfield

#50. I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike.

James A. Garfield

#51. Honesty is the best policy, says the familiar axiom; but people who are honest on that principle defraud no one but themselves.

James A. Garfield

#52. I found a kind of party terrorism pervading and oppressing the minds of our best men.

James A. Garfield

#53. When the shadow of the Presidential and Congressional election is lifted we shall, I hope to be in a better temper to legislate.

James A. Garfield

#54. Justice and goodwill will outlast passion.

James A. Garfield

#55. History is constantly repeating itself, making only such changes of programme as the growth of nations and centuries requires.

James A. Garfield

#56. The refunding of the national debt at a lower rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of the national-bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country.

James A. Garfield

#57. The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.

James A. Garfield

#58. In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands.

James A. Garfield

#59. The return to solid values is always hard ... Distress, panic, and hard times have marked our pathway in returning to solid values.

James A. Garfield

#60. Right reason is stronger than force.

James A. Garfield

#61. History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

James A. Garfield

#62. [I]t would be unjust to our people and dangerous to our institutions to apply any portion of revenues of the nation or of the States to the support of sectarian schools.

James A. Garfield

#63. I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.

James A. Garfield

#64. The civil service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law.

James A. Garfield

#65. Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.

James A. Garfield

#66. To all our means of culture is added the powerful incentive to personal ambition, no post of honor is so high but the poorest may hope to reach it.

James A. Garfield

#67. Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear, like owls and bats, before the light of day.

James A. Garfield

#68. My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?

James A. Garfield

#69. The right of private judgment is absolute in every American citizen.

James A. Garfield

#70. Mankind have been slow to believe that order reigns in the universe-that the world is a cosmos and a chaos.

James A. Garfield

#71. There are some things I am afraid of: I am afraid to do a mean thing.

James A. Garfield

#72. I have had many troubles in my life, but the worst of them never came.

James A. Garfield

#73. I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that i may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.

James A. Garfield

#74. All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

James A. Garfield

#75. It is not right or manly to lie even about Satan.

James A. Garfield

#76. Power exhibits itself under two distinct forms,
strength and force,
each possessing peculiar qualities, and each perfect in its own sphere. Strength is typified by the oak, the rock, the mountain. Force embodies itself in the cataract, the tempest, and the thunder-bolt.

James A. Garfield

#77. A noble life crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth.

James A. Garfield

#78. It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.

James A. Garfield

#79. If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it.

James A. Garfield

#80. I so despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme.

James A. Garfield

#81. Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

James A. Garfield

#82. Real political issues cannot be manufactured by the leaders of political parties, and real ones cannot be evaded by political parties. The real political issues of the day declare themselves, and come out of the depths of that deep which we call public opinion.

James A. Garfield

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

James A. Garfield

#84. Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe,
human or divine. A law is not law without coercion behind it.

James A. Garfield

#85. The possession of great powers no doubt carries with it a comtempt for mere external show

James A. Garfield

#86. Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification.

James A. Garfield

#87. I admitted, that the world had existed millions of years. I am astonished at the ignorance of the masses on these subjects. Hugh Miller has it right when he says that 'the battle of evidences must now be fought on the field of the natural sciences.'

James A. Garfield

#88. A nation is not worthy to be saved if, in the hour of its fate, it will not gather up all its jewels of manhood and life, and go down into the conflict however bloody and doubtful, resolved on measureless ruin or complete success.

James A. Garfield

#89. Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that the United States is a giant without bones. Since that time our gristle has been rapidly hardening.

James A. Garfield

#90. Monuments may be builded to express the affection or pride of friends, or to display their wealth, but they are only valuable for the characters which they perpetuate.

James A. Garfield

#91. For honest merit to succeed amid the tricks and intrigues which are now so lamentably common, I know is difficult; but the honor of success is increased by the obstacles which are to be surmounted. Let me triumph as a man or not at all.

James A. Garfield

#92. The best system of education is that which draws its chief support from the voluntary effort of the community, from the individual efforts of citizens, and from those burdens of taxation which they voluntarily impose upon themselves.

James A. Garfield

#93. I will not vote against the truths of the multiplication table.

James A. Garfield

#94. You and I are now nearly in middle age, and have not yet become soured and shrivelled with the wear and tear of life. Let us pray to be delivered from that condition where life and nature have no fresh, sweet sensations for us.

James A. Garfield

#95. [It is possible] that the race of red men ... will, before many generations, be remembered only as a strange, weird, dream-like specter, which has passed once before the eyes of men, but had departed forever.

James A. Garfield