William Howard Taft (1857 – 1930)
27th President of the United States (1909–1913) and 10th Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930).
I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk.
There is nothing so despicable as a secret society that is based upon religious prejudice and that will attempt to defeat a man because of his religious beliefs. Such a society is like a cockroach — it thrives in the dark. So do those who combine for such an end.
I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade of each becomes more valuable to the other.
Some men are graduated from college cum laude, some are graduated summa cum laude, and some are graduated mirabile dictu.
No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.
I am a Unitarian. I believe in God. I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe.
Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken with out developing new evils requiring new remedies.
Presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever.
Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.
One of the marvelous things about him is that he is strong enough to force the men who dislike him the most to stand by him. By far he is the strongest man before the people to-day except Roosevelt. I think his greatest fault is his failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done. This is a great weakness in any man. I think it was one of the strongest things about Roosevelt. He never tried to minimize what other people did and often exaggerated it.
Enthusiasm for a cause sometimes warps judgment.
Presidents may go to the seashore or to the mountains. Cabinet officers may go about the country explaining how fortunate the country is in having such an administration, but the machinery at Washington continues to operate under the army of faithful non-commissioned officers, and the great mass of governmental business is uninterrupted.
There is only one thing I wast to say about Ohio that has a political tinge, and that is that I think a mistake has been made of recent years in Ohio in failing to continue as our representatives the same people term after term. I do not need to tell a Washington audience, among whom there are certainly some who have been interested in legislation, that length of service in the House and in the Senate is what gives influence.
If humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.
Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that to-day is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.
The welfare of the farmer is vital to that of the whole country.
Politics, when I am in it, makes me sick.
The publishers profess to be the agents of heaven in establishing virtue and therefore that they ought to receive some subsidy from the government. I can ask no stronger refutation to this claim … than the utterly unscrupulous methods pursued by them in seeking to influence Congress on this subject.
The intoxication of power rapidly sobers off in the knowledge of its restrictions and under the prompt reminder of an ever-present and not always considerate press, as well as the kindly suggestions that not infrequently come from Congress.
We live in a stage of politics, where legislators seem to regard the passage of laws as much more important than the results of their enforcement.