John Jay Quotes

People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold.

But there will be no justice, there will be no government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as long as the government and its officials permit bribery in any form.

All progress is experimental.

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.

Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous.

Attack another's rights and you destroy your own.

Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of a generous emotion.

Therefore, until the day I die, I am going to do what I can, regardless of the cost to me, to try to stop this awful corruption that is destroying our beloved democracy.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.

Too much agreement kills the chat.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

There are plenty of people to whom the crucial problem of their lives never get presented in terms that they can understand.

The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.

Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same - hardihood. Give them raw truth.

The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.

You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.

Wherever you see a man who gives someone else's corruption, someone else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us.

It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.

A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.

If any of you ... have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this; that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.

A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind.

The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.

There can be no stewardship without stewards.

The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think.

The time has come for justice at the ballot box, and justice in the courts, and justice in the legislative halls, and justice in the governor's office.

If you are a friend of the Constitution as I am, I hope you will consider engaging me in the topics of my posts whether you agree or disagree with my position on a particular subject.

Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.

When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise.

Life is a great experience. Dignity is a treasure.

There are lots of people who cannot think seriously without injuring their minds.

As for boredom ... I notice that it leaves me as soon as I am doing something that has got to be done.

It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.

So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid upon all subjects.

We cannot hand our faith to one another.... Even in the Middle Ages, when faith was theoretically uniform, it was always practically individual.

The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.

I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.

A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.

Sen. Frist has every right, and indeed the duty, to see that every presidential nominee for the Federal bench at every level gets an up or down vote.

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.

We cannot hand our faith to one another. ... Even in the Middle Ages when faith was theoretically uniform it was always practically individual.

Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.

The trouble with entering the upper echelon is you have to work harder to stay there.

No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.