57 quotes
We can travel longer, night and day, without losing our spirits than almost any persons we ever met.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Fighting battles is like courting girls: those who make the most pretensions and are boldest usually win.
The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents (1991)
The melancholy thing in our public life is the insane desire to get higher.
I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Perhaps the happiest moment of my life was then, when I saw that our line didn’t break and that the enemy’s did.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier’s occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
It is the desire of the good people of the whole country that sectionalism as a factor in our politics should disappear.
The progress of society is mainly—is, in its proper sense, the improvement in the condition of the workingmen of the world.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Conscience is the authentic voice of God to you.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Youth, however, is a defect that she is fast getting away from and may perhaps be entirely rid of before I shall want her.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
Let every man, every corporation, and especially let every village, town, and city, every county and State, get out of debt and keep out of debt. It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
My policy is trust, peace, and to put aside the bayonet. I do not think the wise policy is to decide contested elections in the States by the use of the national army.
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922)
He serves his party best who serves the country best.