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William Howard Taft
25 quotes
“I am a Unitarian. I believe in God. I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1899 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Yale University (1899), quoted in Henry F. Pringle, William Howard Taft: The Life and Times, vol. 1, p. 45 (1939).
“The welfare of the farmer is vital to that of the whole country.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Farmer and the Republican Party, address in Hot Springs, Virginia (5 August 1908) .
“If humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Irish Humor, address in Hot Springs, Virginia (5 August 1908) .
“We are all imperfect. We can not expect perfect government.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address at a banquet given by the Board of Trade and Chamber of Commerce of Washington, D.C., May 8, 1909.; found in Presidential Addresses and State Papers of William Howard Taft, vol. 1, chapter 7, p. 82 (1910).
“I have come to the conclusion that the major part of the work of a President is to increase the gate receipts of expositions and fairs and bring tourists to town.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter of Archibald Butt to Clara F. Butt (1 June 1909); reprinted in The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt (Doubleday, Doran, & Co., 1930).
“I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade of each becomes more valuable to the other.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address at the Hotel Fairmont in San Francisco (6 October 1909).
“One of the marvelous things about him is that he is strong enough to force the men who dislike him the most to stand by him. By far he is the strongest man before the people to-day except Roosevelt. I think his greatest fault is his failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done. This is a great weakness in any man. I think it was one of the strongest things about Roosevelt. He never tried to minimize what other people did and often exaggerated it.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Charles Evans Hughes, in November 1909, as quoted in Taft and Roosevelt : The intimate letters of Archie Butt (1930) by Archibald Willingham Butt, p. 224; this has sometimes been paraphrased: "Failure to accord credi…
“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 (1857–1930) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address in Pocatello, Idaho (5 October 1911).
“The intoxication of power rapidly sobers off in the knowledge of its restrictions and under the prompt reminder of an ever-present and not always considerate press, as well as the kindly suggestions that not infrequently come from Congress.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Lotus Club (16 November 1912).
“The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets. It is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to the dictates of sound policy and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: State of the Union" (3 December 1912).
“Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Popular Government: Its Essence, Its Permanence and Its Perils, chapter 4, p.90 (1913).
“Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that to-day is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Popular Government: Its Essence, Its Permanence and Its Perils, chapter 4, p.91 (1913).
“There is nothing so despicable as a secret society that is based upon religious prejudice and that will attempt to defeat a man because of his religious beliefs. Such a society is like a cockroach — it thrives in the dark. So do those who combine for such an end.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Young Men's Hebrew Association in New York (20 December 1914).
“It is one of the deepest wounds that I have had as an American and a lover of the Constitution and a believer in progressive conservatism, that such a man as Brandeis could be put on the Court.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Architect of Our Divided Supreme Court By Jill Lepore January 22, 2024 Taft wrote this in 1916, expressing his opposition to Louis Brandeis being nominated to the Supreme Court.
“There is only one thing I wast to say about Ohio that has a political tinge, and that is that I think a mistake has been made of recent years in Ohio in failing to continue as our representatives the same people term after term. I do not need to tell a Washington audience, among whom there are certainly some who have been interested in legislation, that length of service in the House and in the Senate is what gives influence.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech before the Ohio Society, Washington, D.C.; quoted in the Congressional Record (May 23, 1916), vol. 53, p. 8527.
“Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Anti-Semitism in the United States", address to the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago, Illinois (23 December 1920).
“The truth is that in my present life I don’t remember that I ever was president.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Correspondence (1925), quoted in James Chace (2004), 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs
“The world is not going to be saved by legislation.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) said by 1930 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1857–1930) said by 1930 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Presidents may go to the seashore or to the mountains. Cabinet officers may go about the country explaining how fortunate the country is in having such an administration, but the machinery at Washington continues to operate under the army of faithful non-commissioned officers, and the great mass of governmental business is uninterrupted.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) said by 1930 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken with out developing new evils requiring new remedies.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) said by 1930 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1857–1930) said by 1930 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I run as the regular Republican nominee, I may go down to defeat if a bolt is started by Roosevelt, but I will retain the regular organization of the party as a nucleus about which the conservative people who are in favor of maintaining constitutional government can gather, both from the Democratic and Republican parties, and we will have two radicals and one conservative.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) said by 1930 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in William Howard Taft A Conservative's Conception of the Presidency By Donald F. Anderson, 1973, P.185. Taft said this to William Worthington in explaining how he saw his renomination, as one historian put it, “…
“The President so fully represents his party, which secures political power by its promise to the people, and the whole government is so identified in the minds of the people with his personality that they make him responsible for all the sins of omission and of commission of society at large. This would be ludicrous if it did not have sometimes serious results. 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 things that have happened in this way. He has no power of state legislation, which covers a very wide field and which comes in many respects much closer to the happiness of the people than the Federal Government.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) said by 1930 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: William Howard Taft Essential Writings and Addresses. Edited by David H. Burton. Faitleigh Dickinson University Press (2009). Chapter 1: Political Analyses. Subchapter: The President and His Powers, page 149-150.
“It is important, of course, that controversies be settled right, but there are many civil questions which arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled. Of course a settlement of a controversy on a fundamentally wrong principle of law is greatly to be deplored, but there must of necessity be many rules governing the relations between members of the same society that are more important in that their establishment creates a known rule of action than that they proceed on one principle or another. Delay works always for the man with the longest purse.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Adequate Machinery for Judicial Business," Journal of the American Bar Association, vol. 7, p. 454 (September 1921).