615 – Rutherford B Hayes on Extreme Partisanship in the Wake of President Garfield’s Assassination

“One of lessons [of the assassination of James A Garfield], perhaps its most important lesson, is the folly, the wickedness, and the danger of the extreme and bitter partisanship which so largely prevails in our country. This partisan bitterness is greatly aggravated by that system of appointments and removals which deals with public offices as rewards for services rendered to political parties or to party leaders. Hence crowds of importunate place-hunters of whose dregs [Charles J] Guiteau[, Garfield’s assassin] is the type. The required reform will be accomplished whenever the people imperatively demand it, not only of their Executive, but also of their Legislative Officers. With it, the class to which the assassin belongs will lose their occupation, and the temptation to try “to administer government by assassination” will be taken away.”

–Rutherford B Hayes, 19th President of the United States of America

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544 – “It is the desire of the good people of the whole country that sectionalism as a factor in our politics should disappear.”

–Rutherford B Hayes, 19th President of the United States of America

349 – “The GOP tax bill’s bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”

–Bill Kristol, Founder and Editor-at-Large of The Weekly Standard

275 – “It is intolerable and indecent for a society to produce by overworking and underpaying human beings. Even if the product may cost more we in this country eventually accept the difference in cost because it is the man that counts – not the thing.”

–James Mitchell, 8th United States Secretary of Labor (1953-1961)

102 – “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

– Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States of America

101 – “Democracy is not a tearing down; it is a building up. It is not denial of the divine right of kings; it supplements that same with the assertion of the divine right of all men. It does not destroy; it fulfills. It is the consummation of all theories of government, the spirit of which all the nations of the earth must yield. It is the great constructive course of the ages.”

– Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States of America

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

– William Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States of America