Top 200 Calvin Coolidge Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “This country would not be a land of opportunity, America could not be America, if the people were shackled with government monopolies.”

— Calvin Coolidge

152. “It would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant.”

— Calvin Coolidge

153. “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.”

— Calvin Coolidge

154. “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”

— Calvin Coolidge

155. “Works which endure come from the soul of the people. The mighty in their pride walk alone to destruction. The humble walk hand in hand with providence to immortality. Their works survive.”

— Calvin Coolidge

156. “The right thing to do never requires any subterfuge, it is always simple and direct.”

— Calvin Coolidge

157. “Eat it up, make it do, wear it out.”

— Calvin Coolidge

158. “Our doctrine of equality and liberty and humanity comes from our belief in the brotherhood of man, through the fatherhood of God.”

— Calvin Coolidge

159. “Look well to the hearthstone; therein all hope for America lies.”

— Calvin Coolidge

160. “No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.”

— Calvin Coolidge

161. “We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither.”

— Calvin Coolidge

162. “You don’t have to explain something you never said.”

— Calvin Coolidge

163. “Workmen’s compensation, hours and conditions of labor are cold consolations, if there be no employment.”

— Calvin Coolidge

164. “But this does not detract from the wisdom of his faith in the people and his constant insistence that they be left to manage their own affairs. His opposition to bureaucracy will bear careful analysis, and the country could stand a great deal more of its application. The trouble with us is that we talk about Jefferson but do not follow him. In his theory that the people should manage their government, and not be managed by it, he was everlastingly right.”

— Calvin Coolidge

165. “Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”

— Calvin Coolidge

166. “Prosperity cannot be divorced from humanity.”

— Calvin Coolidge

167. “Wealth comes from industry and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity. This is by no means a doctrine of parsimony. Both men and nations should live in accordance with their means and devote their substance not only to productive industry, but to the creation of the various forms of beauty and the pursuit of culture which give adornments to the art of life.”

— Calvin Coolidge

168. “It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.”

— Calvin Coolidge

169. “You know, I have found out in the course of a long public life that the things I did not say never hurt me.”

— Calvin Coolidge

170. “Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising.”

— Calvin Coolidge

171. “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

172. “When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results.”

— Calvin Coolidge

173. “There have been great men with little of what we call education. There have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never been a great people who did not possess great learning.”

— Calvin Coolidge

174. “No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil.”

— Calvin Coolidge

175. “The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.”

— Calvin Coolidge

176. “Any man who has been placed in the White House cannot feel that it is the result of his own exertions or his own merit. Some power outside and beyond him becomes manifest through him. As he contemplates the workings of his office, he comes to realize with an increasing sense of humility that he is but an instrument in the hands of God.”

— Calvin Coolidge

177. “It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.”

— Calvin Coolidge

178. “The centralization of power in Washington, which nearly all members of Congress deplore in their speech and then support by their votes, steadily increases.”

— Calvin Coolidge

179. “I shouldn’t want you to be surprised, or to draw any particular inference from my making speeches, or not making speeches, out there. I don’t recall any candidate for President that ever injured himself very much by not talking.”

— Calvin Coolidge

180. “Few people are lacking in capacity, but they fail because they are lacking in application.”

— Calvin Coolidge

181. “The property of the people belongs to the people. To take it from them by taxation cannot be justified except by urgent public necessity. Unless this principle be recognized our country is no longer secure, our people no longer free.”

— Calvin Coolidge

182. “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

183. “Our country represents nothing but peaceful intentions toward all the earth, but it ought not to fail to maintain such a military force as comports with the dignity and security of a great people.”

— Calvin Coolidge

184. “Don’t you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?”

— Calvin Coolidge

185. “Baseball is our national game.”

— Calvin Coolidge

186. “A lost article invariably shows up after you replace it.”

— Calvin Coolidge

187. “We cannot permit any inquisition either within or without the law or apply any religious test to the holding of office. The mind of America must be forever free.”

— Calvin Coolidge

188. “These things do not happen by chance. There is much less luck in public affairs than some suppose.”

— Calvin Coolidge

189. “Coolidge expressed his “sympathy with the deep and intense longing which finds such fine expression in the Jewish National Homeland in Palestine.””

— Calvin Coolidge

190. “America has but one main problem – the character of the men and women it shall produce.”

— Calvin Coolidge

191. “One of the greatest perils to an extensive republic is the disregard of individual rights.”

— Calvin Coolidge

192. “The attempt to regulate, control, and prescribe all manner of conduct and social relations is very old. It was always the practice of primitive peoples.”

— Calvin Coolidge

193. “It seems impossible that any man could adequately describe his mother. I cannot describe mine.”

— Calvin Coolidge

194. “When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.”

— Calvin Coolidge

195. “The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. Under this Republic the rewards of industry belong to those who earn them.”

— Calvin Coolidge

196. “The Constitution is the sole source and guaranty of national freedom.”

— Calvin Coolidge

197. “You have to stand every day three or four hours of visitors. Nine-tenths of them want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead-still they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.”

— Calvin Coolidge

198. “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form.”

— Calvin Coolidge

199. “The only way I know to drive out evil from the country is by the constructive method of filling it with good. The country is better off tranquilly considering its blessings and merits, and earnestly striving to secure more of them, than it would be in nursing hostile bitterness about its deficiencies and faults.”

— Calvin Coolidge

200. “We need not concern ourselves much about rights of property if we faithfully observe the rights of persons.”

— Calvin Coolidge