Top 334 Quotes & Sayings by Calvin Coolidge - Page 3

I want the people to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry.

After order and liberty, economy is one of the highest essentials of a free government.

The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately.

If there is to be responsible party government, the party label must be something more than a mere device for securing office. Unless those who are elected under the same party designation are willing to assume sufficient responsibility and exhibit sufficient loyalty and coherence, so that they can cooperate with each other in the support of the broad general principles, of the party platform, the election is merely a mockery, no decision is made at the polls, and there is no representation of the popular will.

We insist on producing a farm surplus, but think the government should find a profitable market for it. We overindulge in speculation, but ask the government to prevent panics. Now the only way to hold the government entirely responsible for conditions is to give up our liberty for a dictatorship. If we continue the more reasonable practice of managing our own affairs we must bear the burdens of our own mistakes. A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance.

We do not need to import any foreign economic ideas or any foreign government. We had better stick to the American brand of government, the American brand of equality, and the American brand of wages. America had better stay American

America has but one main problem -- the character of the men and women it shall produce.

It is not in violence and crime that our greatest danger lies. These evils are so perfectly apparent that they very quickly arouse the moral power of the people for their suppression. A far more serious danger lurks in the shirking of those responsibilities of citizenship, where the evil may not be so noticeable but is more insidious and likely to be more devastating.

You have to stand every day three or four hours of visitors. Nine-tenths of them want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead-still they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.

We have got so many regulatory laws already that in general I feel that we would be just as well off if we didn't have any more.

Few people are lacking in capacity, but they fail because they are lacking in application.

Nations are beginning to look to some vague organization, some nebulous course of humanity, to pay their bills and tell them what to do. This is not local self-government. It is not American. It is not the method which has made this country what it is. We can not maintain the western standard of civilization on that theory. If it is supported at all, it will have to be supported on the principle of individual responsibility.

When each citizen submits himself to the authority of law he does not thereby decrease his independence or freedom, but rather increases it. By recognizing that he is a part of a larger body which is banded together for a common purpose, he becomes more than an individual, he rises to a new dignity of citizenship. Instead of finding himself restricted and confined by rendering obedience to public law, he finds himself protected and defended and in the exercise of increased and increasing rights.

I think the American public wants a solemn ass as a president, and I think I'll go along with them.

We want wealth, but there are many other things we want very much more. Among them are peace, honor, charity, and idealism.

The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential.

We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither.

As I went about with my father, when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid someone had to work hard to earn the money to pay them.

Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control. Where ever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press.

Our domestic problems are for the most part economic. We have our enormous debt to pay, and we are paying it. We have the high cost of government to diminish, and we are diminishing it. We have a heavy burden of taxation to reduce, and we are reducing it. But while remarkable progress has been made in these directions, the work is yet far from accomplished.

The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. Under this Republic the rewards of industry belong to those who earn them.

Workmen’s compensation, hours and conditions of labor are cold consolations, if there be no employment.

There is no surer road to destruction than prosperity without character.

Anytime you don't want anything you get it.

The attempt to regulate, control, and prescribe all manner of conduct and social relations is very old. It was always the practice of primitive peoples.

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments.

It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.

The final solution for unemployment is work.

The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. ... The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all.

Man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny.

Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.

There is no justification for public interference with purely private concerns.

I want taxes to be less, that the people may have more.

A display of reason rather than a threat of force should be the determining factor in the intercourse among nations.

What we need in appointive positions is men of knowledge and experience who have sufficient character to resist temptations.

The doctrine of the Declaration of Independence predicated upon the glory of man and the corresponding duty to society that the rights of citizens ought to be protected with every power and resource of the state, and a government that does any less is false to the teachings of that great document - false to the name American.

If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and everyone else only their conduct we shall soon reach a very false conclusion.

The higher state to which [America] seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God.

Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.

Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table.

Numbered among our population are some 12,000,000 colored people. Under our Constitution their rights are just as sacred as those of any other citizen. It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights. The Congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crime of lynching, of which the negroes are by no means the sole sufferers, but for which they furnish a majority of the victims.

There have been great men with little of what we call education. There have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never been a great people who did not possess great learning.

The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization.

I did not see the sense in chasing a little white ball around a field.

Education should be the handmaid of citizenship.

I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.

That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, most of it bad.

Despotism has forever had a powerful hold upon the world. Autocratic government, not self-government, has been the prevailing state of mankind. The record of past history is the record, not of the success of republics, but of their failure.

I cannot think of anything characteristically American that was not produced by toil. I cannot think of any American man or woman preeminent in the history of our nation who did not reach their place through toil. I cannot think of anything that represents the American people as a whole so adequately as honest work.

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

Nobody will ever forget what I've accomplished.

Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.

The danger to America is not in the direction of the failure to maintain its economic position, but in the direction of the failure to maintain its ideals.

Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of the nation.

We cannot permit any inquisition either within or without the law or apply any religious test to the holding of office. The mind of America must be forever free.

This country would not be a land of opportunity, America could not be America, if the people were shackled with government monopolies.

There is new life in the soil for every man. There is healing in the trees for tired minds and for our overburdened spirits, there is strength in the hills, if only we will lift up our eyes. Remember that nature is your great restorer.

One of the greatest favors that can be bestowed upon the American people is economy in government.

There is no substitute for a militant freedom.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.