Top 80 William Howard Taft Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage.”

— William Howard Taft

2. “Don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be misunderstood.”

— William Howard Taft

3. “Too many people don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t happen to them.”

— William Howard Taft

4. “If they will play fair I will play fair, but if they won’t then I reserve all my rights to do anything I find myself able to do.”

— William Howard Taft

5. “Presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever.”

— William Howard Taft

6. “Repeat mantra: Donuts are not vitamins, donuts are not...”

— William Howard Taft

7. “The Masonic system represents a stupendous and beautiful fabric, founded on universal purity, to rule and direct our passions, to have faith and love in God, and charity toward man.”

— William Howard Taft

8. “We are all imperfect. We can not expect perfect government.”

— William Howard Taft

9. “The policy of dollar diplomacy is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to dictates of sound policy, and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims.”

— William Howard Taft

10. “I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.”

— William Howard Taft

11. “A government is for the benefit of all the people.”

— William Howard Taft

12. “The underlying principle of Masonry is the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. In this war we are engaging in upholding these principles and our enemies are attacking them.”

— William Howard Taft

13. “The man with the average mentality, but with control, with a definite goal, and a clear conception of how it can be gained, and above all, with the power of application and labor, wins in the end.”

— William Howard Taft

14. “The trouble with me is that I like to talk too much.”

— William Howard Taft

15. “The true Mason is ever vigilant for subtle traces of character and personality flaws which daily experience brings out.”

— William Howard Taft

16. “Masonry aims at the promotion of morality and higher living by the cultivation of the social side of man, the rousing in him of the instincts of charity and love of his kind. It rests surely on the foundation of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.”

— William Howard Taft

17. “My impression about the Panama Canal is that the great revolution it is going to introduce in the trade of the world is in the trade between the east and the west coast of the United States.”

— William Howard Taft

18. “We passed the Children’s Bureau bill calculated to prevent children from being employed too early in factories.”

— William Howard Taft

19. “The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to the modern idea of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets.”

— William Howard Taft

20. “No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.”

— William Howard Taft

21. “Failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done is a great weakness in any man.”

— William Howard Taft

22. “Golf in the interest of good health and good manners. It promotes self-restraint and affords a chance to play the man and act the gentleman.”

— William Howard Taft

23. “The true Mason never hesitates to use the working tools to correct personal flaws.”

— William Howard Taft

24. “The true Mason takes full responsibility for the condition of his character and ever strives for its perfection.”

— William Howard Taft

25. “The truth is that in my present life I don’t remember that I ever was president.”

— William Howard Taft

26. “Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken without developing new evils requiring new remedies.”

— William Howard Taft

27. “The City that knows how.”

— William Howard Taft

28. “The President cannot make clouds to rain and cannot make the corn to grow. He cannot make business good, although when these things occur, political parties do claim some credit for the good things that have happened in this way.”

— William Howard Taft

29. “Well, I have one consolation. No candidate was ever elected ex-president by such a large majority!”

— William Howard Taft

30. “A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.”

— William Howard Taft

31. “The game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics. It furnishes amusement to the thousands and thousands.”

— William Howard Taft

32. “The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old “laissez faire” school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.”

— William Howard Taft

33. “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.”

— William Howard Taft

34. “The cheerful loser is a sort of winner.”

— William Howard Taft

35. “There is no legislation – I care not what it is – tariff, railroads, corporations, or of a general political character, that all equals in importance the putting of our banking and currency system on the sound basis proposed in the National Monetary Commission plan.”

— William Howard Taft

36. “The prosperity of Masonry as a means of strengthening our religion and propagating true brotherly love, is one of the dearest wishes of my heart, which, I trust, will be gratified by the help of the Grand Architect of the Universe.”

— William Howard Taft

37. “We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.”

— William Howard Taft

38. “The Masonic Fraternity is one of the most helpful mediating and conserving organizations among men, and I have never wavered from that childhood impression, but it has stood steadfastly with me through the busy, vast hurrying years.”

— William Howard Taft

39. “No, the only things which do not bother me are the elements. I can overcome them without a fight. All one has to do to get the best of the elements is to stand pat and one will win.”

— William Howard Taft

40. “We live in a stage of politics, where legislators seem to regard the passage of laws as much more important than the results of their enforcement.”

— William Howard Taft

41. “The true Mason always carries his working tools everywhere.”

— William Howard Taft

42. “The true Mason does not hold or teach the attitude that, I am a Master Mason now and thus I no longer need to be concerned with using the working tools because they were given in the earlier degrees.”

— William Howard Taft

43. “The world is not going to be saved by legislation.”

— William Howard Taft

44. “Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority.”

— William Howard Taft

45. “Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.”

— William Howard Taft

46. “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.”

— William Howard Taft

47. “The true Mason is the Tiler of the Temple of the Heart.”

— William Howard Taft

48. “Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.”

— William Howard Taft

49. “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.”

— William Howard Taft

50. “I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade with each becomes more valuable to the other.”

— William Howard Taft