James A. Garfield
James A. Garfield
James Abram Garfieldwas the 20th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1881, until his assassination later that year. Garfield had served nine terms in the House of Representatives, and had been elected to the Senate before his candidacy for the White House, though he declined the senatorship once he was president-elect. He is the only sitting House member to be elected president...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPresident
Date of Birth19 November 1831
CountryUnited States of America
No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech.
Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.
I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike.
Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I found a kind of party terrorism pervading and oppressing the minds of our best men.
My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?
But for we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare... are to be found portrayed in it.
[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.
Men are tending to materialism. Houses, lands, and worldly goods attract their attention, and as a mirage lure them on to death. Christianity, on the other hand leads only the natural body to death, and for the spirit, it points out a house not built with hands, eternal in the heavens... Let me urge you to follow Him, not as the Nazarene, the Man of Galilee, the carpenter's son, but as the ever living spiritual person, full of love and compassion, who will stand by you in life and death and eternity.
I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.