William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taftserved as the 27th President of the United Statesand as the 10th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for re-election by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft chief justice, a position in which he served...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPresident
Date of Birth15 September 1857
CountryUnited States of America
The cheerful loser is a sort of winner.
We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage.
Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.
Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution . .
Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you...take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible..
As a people, we have the problem of making our forests outlast this generation, or iron outlast this century, and our coal the next; not merely as a matter of convenience or comfort, but as a matter of stern necessity.
He [Roosevelt] has made some speeches that indicate that he is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House, and has proposed a program which is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Constitution.
I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk.
I am afraid I am a constant disappointment to my party. The fact of the matter is, the longer I am President the less of a party man I seem to become.
If this humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.
Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.
We can't have a decent government unless those in power exercise self restraint.
I know how irritating it is to have somebody else lay down rules for your moral uplift, but you've got to stand a great deal in order to make progress....
I do not allow myself to be moved by anything except the law. If there has been a mistake in the law, or if I think there has beenperjury or injustice, I will weigh the petition most carefully, but I do not permit myself to be moved by more harrowing details, and I try to treat each case as if I was reviewing it or hearing it for the first time from the bench.