Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree’s fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down – bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.

A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

Democracy is our commitment. It is our great legacy, a legacy we simply cannot compromise. Democracy is in our DNA.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

I’m asking myself, ‚What do my girls, what do all our children deserve in their president? What kind of a president do we want for them?‘ Well, to start with, I think we want someone who is a unifying force in this country: someone who sees our differences not as a threat, but as a blessing.

The wisest use of American strength is to advance freedom.

Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.

When you’re in a leadership role, you can never please all of the people all of the time. There’s also a lot of responsibility that goes along with it that others may not realize.

God just has a way of working things out the way he wants to and you have no say in that.

A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.

Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

A whole people with the ballot in their hands possess the most conclusive and unlimited power ever entrusted to humanity.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved them.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader – or any person – in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

You cannot be President of the United States if you don’t have faith. Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial in the Civil War and all that stuff.

The President is not only the leader of a party, he is the President of the whole people. He must interpret the conscience of America. He must guide his conduct by the idealism of our people.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

Go before the people with your example, and be laborious in their affairs.

In spiritual things, it is God who performs all things for you. Rest in Him, then.

Some people are jerks, and some people aren’t.

The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

God has entrusted me with myself.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

I looked the people of Louisiana in the eye and told them exactly what I thought in terms that normal people use.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.

If you’re looking for the safe choice, you shouldn’t be supporting a black guy named Barack Obama to be the next leader of the free world.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.

In many ways, when you’re a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.

Music is always a commentary on society.

You know, one of the things I think you understand as president is you’re held responsible for everything, but you don’t always have control of everything, right?

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‚healthy‘ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations‘ economic health.

The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model all your life.

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.