We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift.

But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.

Take a bucket, fill it with water, Put your hand in — clear up to the wrist. Now pull it out; the hole that remains Is a measure of how much you’ll be missed…. The moral of this quaint example: To do just the best that you can, Be proud of yourself, but remember, There is no Indispensible Man!24

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.

Remember that every man at times stumbles and must be helped up: if he's down, you cannot carry him. The only way in which any man can be helped permanently is to help himself.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the people — often in poverty — taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one's whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder.

You compare the nation to a parched piece of land and the tax to a life-giving rain. So be it. But you should also ask yourself where this rain comes from, and whether it is not precisely the tax that draws the moisture from the soil and dries it up. You should also ask yourself further whether the soil receives more of this precious water from the rain than it loses by the evaporation?

This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.

It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.

To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being oppressive and unjust, implies further, the injurious supposition that the organized is infallible, and mankind incompetent.

Never did a state . . . enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens. . . . Every honest mind, every true lover of liberty and humanity must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy, nor rapine the high road to riches.

It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.

Whether he knows it or not, the middle-income American is taxed as though he were living in a socialist society.