James A. Garfield
James A. Garfield
James Abram Garfieldwas the 20th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1881, until his assassination later that year. Garfield had served nine terms in the House of Representatives, and had been elected to the Senate before his candidacy for the White House, though he declined the senatorship once he was president-elect. He is the only sitting House member to be elected president...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPresident
Date of Birth19 November 1831
CountryUnited States of America
Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.
All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.
Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis.
Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.
Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.
For honest merit to succeed amid the tricks and intrigues which are now so lamentably common, I know is difficult; but the honor of success is increased by the obstacles which are to be surmounted. Let me triumph as a man or not at all.
History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.
[The President is] the last person in the world to know what the people really want and think.
To all our means of culture is added the powerful incentive to personal ambition, no post of honor is so high but the poorest may hope to reach it.
In my judgment, while it is the duty of Congress to respect to the uttermost the conscientious convictions and religious scruples of every citizen ... not any ecclesiastical organization can be safely permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the national government.
I have had many troubles in my life, but the worst of them never came.
The divorce between church and state should be absolute.
I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.
Statistical science is indispensable to modern statesmanship. In legislation as in physical science it is beginning to be understood that we can control terrestrial forces only by obeying their laws. The legislator must formulate in his statutes not only the national will, but also those great laws of social life revealed by statistics.