To no body of men in the United States is the country so much indebted as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the regular army and navy.

We must demand the highest order of integrity and ability in our public men who are to grapple with these new problems.

But peace must be the normal condition, or the nation will come to a bloody doom.

There is no body from which the country has less to fear, and none of which it should be prouder, none which it should be more anxious to upbuild.

All we could decide was whether we should shrink like cowards from the contest, or enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and, once in, whether failure or success should crown our banners.

Some stronger, manlier power would have to step in and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited nations are eager to undertake.

A healthy-minded boy should feel hearty contempt for the coward, and even more hearty indignation for the boy who bullies girls or small boys, or tortures animals.

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…

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.

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!

Among the latter is its tendency to create the belief that we need not prepare for war, because somehow we shall be able to win by some novel patent device, some new trick or new invention developed on the spur of the moment by the…

The work must be done; we can not escape our responsibility; and if we are worth our salt, we shall be glad of the chance to do the work—glad of the chance to show ourselves equal to one of the great tasks set modern civilization.

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

Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history.

Above all, let us, as we value our own self-respect, face the responsibilities with proper seriousness, courage, and high resolve.

If Tolstoi’s countrymen had acted according to his moral theories they would now be extinct, and savages would have taken their place.

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.

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.

Nevertheless, all this, though indispensable as a base, would mean nothing whatever for the efficiency of the navy without years of careful preparation and training.

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

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…

He was a plain, quiet man, not seeking for glory; but a man who, when aroused, was always in deadly earnest, and who never shrank from duty.

Fifteen years after the close of the contest in which Farragut took rank as one of the great admirals of all time, the splendid navy of which he was the chief ornament had become an object of derision, to every third-rate power in Europe…

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?

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.