A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

• Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.
• The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.
• In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
• Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
• The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
• It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
• A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
• It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.
• Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage.
• Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.