Historical voices

But you did more, for you saved us from annihilation.

Other men have rendered great service to the country, but the service you rendered was not merely great—it was incalculable.

It is difficult to express the full measure of obligation under which this country is to the men who from ’61 to ’65 took up the most terrible and vitally necessary task which has ever fallen to the lot of any generation of men in the…

In our internal policy we can not afford to rest satisfied until all that the government can do has been done to secure fair dealing and equal justice as between man and man.

For the sake not only of ourselves but of our children and our children’s children we must see that this nation stands for strength and honesty both at home and abroad.

We can not retain the full measure of our self-respect if we can not retain pride in our citizenship.

We are in honor bound each to strive according to his or her strength to bring ever nearer the day when justice and wisdom shall obtain in public life as in private life.

Each of us has not only his duty to himself, his family, and his neighbors, but his duty to the State and to the nation.

To be a good husband or good wife, a good neighbor and friend, to be hard-working and upright in business and social relations, to bring up many healthy children—to be and to do all this is to lay the foundations of good citizenship as…

It is the merest truism to say that the nation rests upon the individual, upon the family—upon individual manliness and womanliness, using the words in their widest and fullest meaning.

We can no more afford to lose social and civic decency and honesty than we can afford to lose the qualities of courage and strength.

Woe to all of us if ever as a people we grow to condone evil because it is successful.

But no less is it true that had either been influenced by self-seeking ambition, by callous disregard of others, by contempt for the moral law, he would have dashed us down into the black gulf of failure.

The least touch of flabbiness, of unhealthy softness, in either would have meant ruin for this nation, and therefore the downfall of the proudest hope of mankind.

If Washington and Lincoln had not had in them the whipcord fibre of moral and mental strength, the soul that steels itself to endure disaster unshaken and with grim resolve to wrest victory from defeat, then the one could not have founded…

If the strong man has not in him the lift toward lofty things his strength makes him only a curse to himself and to his neighbor.

If courage and strength and intellect are unaccompanied by the moral purpose, the moral sense, they become merely forms of expression for unscrupulous force and unscrupulous cunning.

This country can not afford to have its sons less than men; but neither can it afford to have them other than good men.

We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always be done, and to persevere through the long days of slow progress or of seeming failure which…

It is not given to us all to succeed, but it is given to us all to strive manfully to deserve success.

But if he does not make the effort, or if he makes it half-heartedly and recoils from the labor, the risk, or the irksome monotony of his task, why, he has forfeited all right to our respect, and has shown himself a mere cumberer of the…

If, after making all the effort that his strength of body and of mind permits, he yet honorably fails, why, he is still entitled to a certain share of respect because he has made the effort.

We hold work not as a curse but as a blessing, and we regard the idler with scornful pity.

In the abounding energy and intensity of existence in our mighty democratic Republic there is small space indeed for the idler, for the luxury-loving man who prizes ease more than hard, triumph-crowned effort.