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Fellow-citizens! Clouds and darkness are round about Him! His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies! Justice and judgment are the establishment of His throne! Mercy and truth shall go before His face! Fellow-citizens! God reigns and the Government at Washington still lives!
--
A declaration reportedly made April 15, 1865, to calm a mob on Wall Street in New York after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, according to a reminiscence of "a distinguished gentleman who was present," published in the Cincinatti Gazette in 1880 and circulated during Garfield's presidential campaign, as recorded in The Republican Manual : History, Principles, Early Leaders, Achievements of the Republican Party with Biographical Sketches of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (1880) Eugene Virgil Smiley, p. 241; after Garfield's assassination, the anecdote was widely reprinted. However, contemporary accounts give a completely different speech by Garfield and no mention of Garfield calming a mob. See The National Calamity in The New York Times (16 April 1865) and Garfield : A Biography (1978) by Allan Peskin, p. 250. Reported as a misattribution in Paul F. Boller, John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (1990), p. 32.

 

James A. Garfield

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I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection; that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government; to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow citizens of the United States at large; and, particularly, for their brethren who have served in the Geld; and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacifick temper of the mind, which were the characteristicks of the divine Author of our blessed religion ; without an humble imitation of whose example, in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.

 

George Washington

 

The man who saw his fellow US citizens burned alive, torn apart by a mob, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah, and responded by writing “Screw Them,” is now claiming to be the messenger of truth to the citizens of the US.

 

Charles Foster Johnson

 

To State Department employees: "Yours is not an easy task nor one which is much appreciated. You don't ask much of your fellow citizens, and if any of you are so inexperienced that you ever do, you will receive very little. Certainly not much in the form of material recompense; certainly not much in the form of appreciation for your work, because you are dealing with matters which, though they affect life of every citizen of this country intimately, do it in ways which it is not easy for every citizen to understand. And so you are dealing in a field which I called the other day a field of 'alien knowledge,' which seems strange to many of your fellow citizens … We have a tradition in this country of skepticism about government, of looking at it very carefully, of seeing whether our public servants can take it. That isn't always comfortable, but, on the whole, it is good. Any time when there are governments in the world which are crushing the liberties of their citizens, it is good that in this great country people look with some skepticism upon government as such. That is one of our traditions … "

 

Dean Acheson

 

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If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.

 

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