“Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.”

– Winston Churchill, 1943

“A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.”

– Peter Marshall

“Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light.”

– George Washington

“My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them or indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures, which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge; or of the present aspect of affairs; do I despair of the future.

The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

– Robert E. Lee,
letter to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Marshall, 1870

*Painting of Robert E. Lee by Edward Caledon Bruce, 1865 (source)

“Success does not lie entirely in the hands of any one of us. From the day the tower of Siloam fell, misfortune has fallen sometimes upon the just as well as the unjust. We sometimes see the good man, the honest man, the strong man, broken down by forces over which he had no control. If the hand of the Lord is heavy upon us the strength and wisdom of man shall avail nothing. But as a rule in the long run each of us comes pretty near to getting what he deserves. Each of us can, as a rule there are, of course, exceptions finally achieve the success best worth having, the success of having played his part honestly and manfully; of having lived so as to feel at the end he has done his duty; of having been a good husband, a good father; of having tried to make the world a little better off rather than worse off because he has lived; of having been a doer of the word and not a hearer only still less a mere critic of the doers. Every man has it in him, unless fate is indeed hard upon him, to win out that measure of success if he will honestly try.”

– Theodore Roosevelt,
excerpt from “Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School,” 1904

*President Theodore Roosevelt and his four sons, the New York Tribune, May 29th, 1904 (source)

“What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.”

– Will Rogers 

“As long as you are imitating someone else, the most that you can ever hope to be is second best.”  

– Paul Harvey,
as quoted in Paul Harvey’s America (Mansfield/Holland) 

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

– George Orwell

“All through life, be sure and put your feet in the right place, and then stand firm.”

– Abraham Lincoln
(recalled by Rebecca R. Pomroy)

“In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed. . . . No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.”

– Noah Webster