Historical voices

We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them!

Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant!

And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not…

Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history.

It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history.

When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are…

The man must be glad to do a man’s work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him.

In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not…

A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.

A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.

Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes—to be the ultimate goal after which they strive?

I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole.

A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual.

What I fear is rather this, that if resistance to the national voice of Ireland be pushed too far, those who now guide the mind of that nation may gradually lose their power, and may be supplanted and displaced by ruder and more dangerous…

I do not expect, any more than I desire, these foreign complications, but still it is not wise wholly to shut them out.

But the day may come when your condition may not be so happy.

If this be a question of time at all, then it is most important to consider what is the right time.

This is not the only place where extra legal combinations and anti-legal combinations have been brought into existence for the purpose of mitigating social disorder.

It is a sign that the conditions of legality do not exist.

It is a sign that the law does not do its work.