Seasonable Sayings of Calvin Coolidge
Compiled by Dick Eastman
Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character." The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential."There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.
--Calvin Coolidge
--Calvin Coolidge
The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful.
-- Calvin Coolidge
--Calvin Coolidge
If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress.
--Calvin Coolidge
The right thing to do never requires any subterfuge, it is always simple and direct.
--Calvin Coolidge
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped.
--Calvin Coolidge
We draw our Presidents from the people. It is a wholesome thing for them to return to the people. I came from them. I wish to be one of them again.
When people are bewildered they tend to become credulous.
--Calvin Coolidge
Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion.
--Calvin Coolidge
There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal. "You can't know too much, but you can say too much.
--Calvin Coolidge
To support the Constitution, to observe the laws, is to be true to our own higher nature. That is the path, and the only path, towards liberty. Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.
--Calvin Coolidge
Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.
--Calvin Coolidge
"As we turn through the pages of the press and the periodicals, as we catch the flash of billboards along the railroads and the highways, all of which have become enormous vehicles of the advertising art, I doubt if we realize at all the impressive part that these displays are coming more and more to play in modern life...We see that basically it is that of education...It makes new thoughts, new desires, new actions...Rightfully applied, it is the method by which desire is created for better things. Desire, in turn, is the crucial element separating the civilized from the uncivilized. The uncivilized make little progress because they have few desires. The inhabitants of our country are stimulated to new wants in all directions. In order to satisfy their constantly increasing desires, they necessarily expand their productive powers. They create more wealth because it is only by that method that they can satisfy their wants. It is this constantly enlarging circle that represents the increasing circle of civilization.
Those who trust to chance must abide by the results of chance.
I have found it advisable not to give too much heed to what people say when I am trying to accomplish something of consequence. Invariably they proclaim it can't be done. I deem that the very best time to make the effort.
Advertising is the most potent influence in adapting and changing the habits and modes of life affecting what we eat, what we wear, and the work and play of a whole nation.
--Calvin Coolidge
In the discharge of the duties of this office, there is one rule of action more important than all others. It consists in never doing anything that someone else can do for you."
--Calvin Coolidge
No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others; or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist.
--Calvin Coolidge
--Calvin Coolidge
--Calvin Coolidge
"Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own usiness."Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of face within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.
--Calvin Coolidge
We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.
--Calvin Coolidge
My own participation [in the campaign] was delayed by the death of my son Calvin, which occurred on the seventh of July. He was a boy of much promise, proficient in his studies, with a scholarly mind, who had just turned sixteen.He had a remarkable insight into things.The day I became President he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, "if my father was President I would not work in a tobacco field," Calvin replied, "If my father were your father, you would."...We do not know what might have happened to him under other circumstances, but if I had not been President, he would not have raised a blister on his toe, which resulted in blood poisoning, playing lawn tennis in the South Grounds. In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not.When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding. It seemed to me that the world had need of the work that it was probable he could do. I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.
--Calvin Coolidge