Top 90 James A. Garfield Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”

— James A. Garfield

2. “Of course I deprecate war, but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home.”

— James A. Garfield

3. “I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.”

— James A. Garfield

4. “Now more than ever the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.”

— James A. Garfield

5. “If wrinkles must be written on our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.”

— James A. Garfield

6. “I believe in God, and I trust myself in His hands.”

— James A. Garfield

7. “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.”

— James A. Garfield

8. “Things don’t turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.”

— James A. Garfield

9. “If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it’s the best possible substitute for it.”

— James A. Garfield

10. “A brave man is a man who dares to look the Devil in the face and tell him he is a Devil.”

— James A. Garfield

11. “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”

— James A. Garfield

12. “We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them.”

— James A. Garfield

13. “A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.”

— James A. Garfield

14. “History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.”

— James A. Garfield

15. “For the love of country they accepted death.”

— James A. Garfield

16. “I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error.”

— James A. Garfield

17. “The civil service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law.”

— James A. Garfield

18. “A noble life crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth.”

— James A. Garfield

19. “He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.”

— James A. Garfield

20. “History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.”

— James A. Garfield

21. “Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification.”

— James A. Garfield

22. “Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.”

— James A. Garfield

23. “Commerce links all mankind in one common brotherhood of mutual dependence and interests.”

— James A. Garfield

24. “Right reason is stronger than force.”

— James A. Garfield

25. “If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.”

— James A. Garfield

26. “Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.”

— James A. Garfield

27. “Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.”

— James A. Garfield

28. “I have had many troubles in my life, but the worst of them never came.”

— James A. Garfield

29. “Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.”

— James A. Garfield

30. “Honesty is the best policy, says the familiar axiom; but people who are honest on that principle defraud no one but themselves.”

— James A. Garfield

31. “Ideas control the world.”

— James A. Garfield

32. “Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis. Conservatives have their place in the piping times of peace; but in emergencies only rugged issue men amount to much.”

— James A. Garfield

33. “Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis.”

— James A. Garfield

34. “I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing. I dread nothing so much as falling into a rut and feeling myself becoming a fossil.”

— James A. Garfield

35. “When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose-tree the rose.”

— James A. Garfield

36. “There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the beatings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite.”

— James A. Garfield

37. “Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”

— James A. Garfield

38. “All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.”

— James A. Garfield

39. “God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!”

— James A. Garfield

40. “In the minds of most men, the kingdom of opinion is divided into three territories, – the territory of yes, the territory of no, and a broad, unexplored middle ground of doubt.”

— James A. Garfield

41. “The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.”

— James A. Garfield

42. “Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.”

— James A. Garfield

43. “Suicide is not a remedy.”

— James A. Garfield

44. “I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that i may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.”

— James A. Garfield

45. “The worst days of darkness through which I have ever passed have been greatly alleviated by throwing myself with all my energy into some work relating to others.”

— James A. Garfield

46. “Tortured for the Republic.”

— James A. Garfield

47. “The best system of education is that which draws its chief support from the voluntary effort of the community, from the individual efforts of citizens, and from those burdens of taxation which they voluntarily impose upon themselves.”

— James A. Garfield

48. “No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech.”

— James A. Garfield

49. “The people are responsible for the character of their Congress.”

— James A. Garfield

50. “Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear, like owls and bats, before the light of day.”

— James A. Garfield