Top 100 William Howard Quotes
#1. Someone threw a cabbage at William Howard Taft. That didn't bother Taft. He quipped, "I see that one of my adversaries has lost his head.
Judith St. George
#2. He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#3. Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.
James Thurber
#4. The man with the average mentality, but with control, with a definite goal, and a clear conception of how it can be gained, and above all, with the power of application and labor, wins in the end.
William Howard Taft
#6. He [Roosevelt] has made some speeches that indicate that he is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House, and has proposed a program which is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Constitution.
William Howard Taft
#7. There is not a subject in which I take a deeper interest than I do in the development of Alaska, and I propose, if Congress will follow by recommendations, to do something in that territory that will make it move on.
William Howard Taft
#8. When the history of this period is written, [William Jennings] Bryan will stand out as one of the most remarkable men of his generation and one of the biggest political men of our country.
William Howard Taft
#9. The Government is able to afford a suitable army and a suitable navy. It may maintain them without the slightest danger to the Republic or the cause of free institutions, and fear of additional taxation ought not to change a proper policy in this regard.
William Howard Taft
#10. If the student truly absorbs the concept of free inquiry in the field of music, unimpeded by blind adherence to doctrine and tradition, he will bring something of this approach not only to other fields of knowledge but to the conduct of his daily life,
William Howard Schuman
#11. The true Mason's level of discernment increases with every use of the working tools, because the true Mason is ever working on him/her self.
William Howard Taft
#12. Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.
William Howard Taft
#13. Golf in the interest of good health and good manners. It promotes self-restraint and affords a chance to play the man and act the gentleman.
William Howard Taft
#14. Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken without developing new evils requiring new remedies.
William Howard Taft
#15. If this humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.
William Howard Taft
#17. I think I might as well give up being a candidate. There are so many people in the country who don't like me.
William Howard Taft
#20. Don't worry over what the newspapers say. I don't. Why should anyone else? I told the truth to the newspaper correspondents - but when you tell the truth to them they are at sea.
William Howard Taft
#21. The true Mason takes full responsibility for the condition of his character and ever strives for its perfection.
William Howard Taft
#22. My impression about the Panama Canal is that the great revolution it is going to introduce in the trade of the world is in the trade between the east and the west coast of the United States.
William Howard Taft
#23. We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.
William Howard Taft
#24. Well, I have one consolation. No candidate was ever elected ex-president by such a large majority!
William Howard Taft
#25. Rules of conduct which govern men in their relations to one another are being applied in an ever-increasing degree to nations. The battlefield as a place of settlement of disputes is gradually yielding to arbitral courts of justice.
William Howard Taft
#27. The true Mason does not hold or teach the attitude that, I am a Master Mason now and thus I no longer need to be concerned with using the working tools because they were given in the earlier degrees.
William Howard Taft
#28. The true Mason ever strives to cultivate Masonry in his/her life to the fullest degree possible.
William Howard Taft
#29. Too many people don't care what happens so long as it doesn't happen to them.
William Howard Taft
#30. The true Mason is ever vigilant for subtle traces of character and personality flaws which daily experience brings out.
William Howard Taft
#31. The laboring man and the trade-unionist, if I understand him, asks only equality before the law. Class legislation and unequal privilege, though expressly in his favor, will in the end work no benefit to him or to society.
William Howard Taft
#32. The President cannot make clouds to rain and cannot make the corn to grow. He cannot make business good, although when these things occur, political parties do claim some credit for the good things that have happened in this way
William Howard Taft
#34. We live in a stage of politics, where legislators seem to regard the passage of laws as much more important than the results of their enforcement.
William Howard Taft
#36. The game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics. It furnishes amusement to the thousands and thousands.
William Howard Taft
#37. The Masonic Fraternity is one of the most helpful mediating and conserving organizations among men, and I have never wavered from that childhood impression, but it has stood steadfastly with me through the busy, vast hurrying years.
William Howard Taft
#38. If they will play fair I will play fair, but if they won't then I reserve all my rights to do anything I find myself able to do.
William Howard Taft
#39. Research by Harvard's Howard Gardner, Stanford's William Damon, and Claremont's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi zeroed in on what they call "good work," a potent mix of what people are excellent at, what engages them, and their ethics - what they believe matters.18
Daniel Goleman
#40. What I am anxious to do is to secure my legislation ... What I want to do is to get through that, and if I can point to a record of usefulness of that kind, I am entirely willing to quit office.
William Howard Taft
#41. The precepts of the Gospel were universally the obligations of Masonry.
William Howard Taft
#42. I don't know whither we are drifting, but I do know where every real thinking patriot will stand in the end, and that's by the Constitution.
William Howard Taft
#44. The true Mason never hesitates to use the working tools to correct personal flaws.
William Howard Taft
#45. I do not know much about politics, but I am trying to do the best I can with this administration until the time shall come for me to turn it over to somebody else.
William Howard Taft
#46. Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.
William Howard Taft
#47. I know this, and I know it from actual experience in the Orient, that the progress of modern Christian civilization has largely depended on the earnest hard work of the Christian missions of every denomination.
William Howard Taft
#49. The secrecy of Masonry is an honorable secrecy; any good man may ask for her secrets; those who are worthy will receive them. To give them to those who do not seek, or who are not worthy, would but impoverish the Fraternity and enrich not those who received them.
William Howard Taft
#52. Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.
William Howard Taft
#53. The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to the modern idea of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets.
William Howard Taft
#54. A system in which we may have an enforced rest from legislation for two years is not bad.
William Howard Taft
#55. As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.
Joe R. Lansdale
#57. I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk.
William Howard Taft
#58. In the public interest, therefore, it is better that we lose the services of the exceptions who are good Judges after they are seventy and avoid the presence on the Bench of men who are not able to keep up with the work, or to perform it satisfactorily.
William Howard Taft
#61. I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade with each becomes more valuable to the other.
William Howard Taft
#62. Your mind is like Heraclitus' river. Your mind, in fact, is like nineteenth-century father of psychology William James' "stream of consciousness," a bubbling, babbling brook. Your mind constantly produces different currents of associations, different swirls of thought, and different moods.
Howard Bloom
#63. A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.
William Howard Taft
#64. Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.
William Howard Taft
#67. I am afraid I am a constant disappointment to my party. The fact of the matter is, the longer I am president the less of a party man I seem to become.
William Howard Taft
#68. Failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done is a great weakness in any man.
William Howard Taft
#69. It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.
William Howard Taft
#70. There are a great many people who are in favor of conservation no matter what it means.
William Howard Taft
#71. As the Republican platforms says, the welfare of the farmer is vital to that of the whole country.
William Howard Taft
#72. When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.
Howard Mumford Jones
#73. The truth is that in my present life I don't remember that I ever was president
William Howard Taft
#74. I am going to do what I think is best for the country, within my jurisdiction and power, and then let the rest take care of itself.
William Howard Taft
#76. I know how irritating it is to have somebody else lay down rules for your moral uplift, but you've got to stand a great deal in order to make progress ...
William Howard Taft
#77. There is no "but" in it. The way to be an administration Senator is to vote with the Administration.
William Howard Taft
#78. The judiciary has fallen to a very low state in this country. I think your part of the country has suffered especially. The federal judges of the South are a disgrace to any country, and I'll be damned if I put any man on the bench of whose character and ability there is the least doubt.
William Howard Taft
#79. The worst bankrupt in the world is the man who has lost his enthusiasm. Let a man lose everything else in the world, but his enthusiasm and he will come through again to success.
William Howard Arnold
#81. I don't know the man I admire more than [Charles Evans] Hughes. If ever I have the chance I shall offer him the Chief Justiceship.
William Howard Taft
#83. We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.
William Howard Taft
#84. The policy of dollar diplomacy is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to dictates of sound policy, and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims.
William Howard Taft
#85. The underlying principle of Masonry is the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. In this war we are engaging in upholding these principles and our enemies are attacking them.
William Howard Taft
#87. I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.
William Howard Taft
#88. The intoxication of power rapidly sobers off in the knowledge of its restrictions and under the prompt reminder of an ever-present and not always considerate press, as well as the kindly suggestions that not infrequently come from Congress.
William Howard Taft
#90. Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.
William Howard Taft
#91. That all may be so, but when I begin to exercise that power I am not conscious of the power, but only of the limitations imposed on me.
William Howard Taft
#92. The garden, historically, is the place where all the senses are exploited. Not just the eye, but the ear - with water, with birds. And there is texture, too, in plants you long to touch.
William Howard Adams
#93. The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old "laissez faire" school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.
William Howard Taft
#94. When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
#95. I would like to have an ample fund to spread the light of Republicanism, but I am willing to undergo the disadvantage to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics for unworthy purposes.
William Howard Taft
#96. We shall have to begin all over again. [Taft hoped that] the Senators might change their minds, or that the people might change the Senate; instead of which they changed me.
William Howard Taft
#97. Anyone who has taken the oath I have just taken must feel a heavy weight of responsibility. If not, he has no conception of the powers and duties of the office.
William Howard Taft
#98. Action for which I become responsible, or for which my administration becomes responsible, shall be within the law.
William Howard Taft
#99. As a people, we have the problem of making our forests outlast this generation, or iron outlast this century, and our coal the next; not merely as a matter of convenience or comfort, but as a matter of stern necessity.
William Howard Taft
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