American Government and Civics Daily Quotations

• 1. Day 1
  No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.
  Thomas Jefferson
  

2. Day 2
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
Abraham Lincoln
3. Day 3
Testing oneself is best when done alone.
James Earl Carter
4. Day 4
Where ... do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
5. Day 5
In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.
Ulysses S. Grant
6. Day 6
I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.
Harriet Tubman
7. Day 7
A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.
James Madison
8. Day 8
I am heartily rejoiced that my term is so near its close. I will soon cease to be a servant and will become a sovereign.
James Polk
9. Day 9
Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette - the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace.
John Tyler
10. Day 10
Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body - the producers and consumers themselves.
Herbert Hoover
11. Day 11
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
Thomas Jefferson
12. Day 12
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
George Washington
13. Day 13
Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.
John Locke
14. Day 14
All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.
Benjamin Franklin
15. Day 15
Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.
Andrew Jackson
16. Day 16
I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
Benjamin Harrison
17. Day 17
The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.
William McKinley
18. Day 18
Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
John Adams
19. Day 19
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
Benjamin Franklin
20. Day 20
The judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, as both should be checks upon that.
John Adams
21. Day 21
It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.
John Locke
22. Day 22
I have loved my work . . .but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.
W.E.B. Deboise
23. Day 23
I think when you spread the wealth around it's good for everybody.
Barack H. Obama
24. Day 24
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
John Adams
25. Day 25
To avoid the necessity of a permanent debt and its inevitable consequences, I have advocated and endeavored to carry into effect the policy of confining the appropriations for the public service to such objects only as are clearly with the constitutional authority of the Federal Government.
Martin Van Buren
26. Day 26
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln
27. Day 27
I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.
Harriet Tubman
28. Day 28
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
Thurgood Marshall
29. Day 29
When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.
George W. Carver
30. Day 30
Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right.
Lyndon B. Johnson
31. Day 31
Historically courts in this country have been insulated. We do not look beyond our borders for precedents.
Sandra Day Oconner
32. Day 32
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
Warren G. Harding
33. Day 33
I am groping about through this American forest of prejudice and proscription, determined to find some form of civilization where all men will be accepted for what they are worth.
P.B.S Pinchback
34. Day 34
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
Thomas Jefferson
35. Day 35
Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.
William Howard Taft
36. Day 36
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
Thomas Jefferson
37. Day 37
We don't accomplish anything in this world alone... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.
Sandra Day Oconner
38. Day 38
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
39. Day 39
Wealth can only be accumulated by the earnings of industry and the savings of frugality.
John Tyler
40. Day 40
Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damn business.
Chester A. Author
41. Day 41
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
42. Day 42
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
John F. Kennedy
43. Day 43
Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.
Charles de Montesquieu
44. Day 44
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
John Quincy Adams
45. Day 45
I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end... I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
Abraham Lincoln
46. Day 46
History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.
John F. Kennedy
47. Day 47
Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.
Grover Cleveland
48. Day 48
The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.
Grover Cleveland
49. Day 49
Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
50. Day 50
The test of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.
James Buchanan
51. Day 51
I don't know much about Americanism, but it's a damn good word with which to carry an election.
Warren G. Harding
52. Day 52
Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.
Ronald Reagan
53. Day 53
If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.
Grover Cleveland
54. Day 54
One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.
Rutherford B. Hayes
55. Day 55
The only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.
William Henry Harrison
56. Day 56
I believe that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
William Henry Harrison
57. Day 57
If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
Thurgood Marshall
58. Day 58
The progress of society is mainly the improvement in the condition of the workingmen of the world.
Rutherford B. Hayes
59. Day 59
I am sworn to uphold the Constitution as Andy Johnson understands it and interprets it.
Andrew Johnson
60. Day 60
Legislation can neither be wise nor just which seeks the welfare of a single interest at the expense and to the injury of many and varied interests.
Andrew Johnson
61. Day 61
Every President wants to do right.
Lyndon B. Johnson
62. Day 62
A Republic without parties is a complete anomaly. The histories of all popular governments show absurd is the idea of their attempting to exist without parties.
Franklin Pierce
63. Day 63
One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.
James Polk
64. Day 64
Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.
Ronald Reagan
65. Day 65
I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.
George W. Bush
66. Day 66
I'll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.
George H. W. Bush
67. Day 67
At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.
Benjamin Franklin
68. Day 68
We are a nation of communities... a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.
George H. W. Bush
69. Day 69
Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.
James Earl Carter
70. Day 70
In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
Charles de Montesquieu
71. Day 71
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
Abraham Lincoln
72. Day 72
No one has been barred on account of his race from fighting or dying for America, there are no white or colored signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.
John F. Kennedy
73. Day 73
We must teach our children to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.
William J. Clinton
74. Day 74
. . .liberty is itself immortal. Political assemblies can not legislate its destruction, nor can ecclesiastical decrees tarnish the glory of its existence.
John Mercer Langston
75. Day 75
In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.
Ulysses S. Grant
76. Day 76
It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
James Madison
77. Day 77
Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.
Grover Cleveland
78. Day 78
I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.
Barack H. Obama
79. Day 79
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
80. Day 80
Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
81. Day 81
Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.
Grover Cleveland
82. Day 82
None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots.
Thurgood Marshall
83. Day 83
All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.
John Adams
84. Day 84
Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
85. Day 85
I don't think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.
Richard M. Nixon
86. Day 86
Strength and wisdom are not opposing values.
William J. Clinton
87. Day 87
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
88. Day 88
Every good citizen makes his country's honor his own, and cherishes it not only as precious but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defense and its conscious that he gains protection while he gives it.
Andrew Jackson
89. Day 89
We are all imperfect. We can not expect perfect government.
William Howard Taft
90. Day 90
What is right and what is practicable are two different things.
James Buchanan
91. Day 91
Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
John Locke
92. Day 92
If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.
George Washington
93. Day 93
A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it.
George W. Bush
94. Day 94
All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
Harry S. Truman