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James A. Garfield Quotes
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James Abram Garfield was an American soldier and politician who served as the 20th President of the United States in 1881. He was the second president to be assassinated, killed after only about 6 months in office. Garfield had served nine terms in the House of Representatives, and had been elected to the Senate before his candidacy for the White House, though he declined the Senate seat once he was elected president. He is the only sitting House member to be elected president.Garfield was raised by his widowed mother in humble circumstances on an Ohio farm. He worked at various jobs, including on a canal boat, in his youth. Beginning at age 17, he attended several Ohio schools, then studied at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, graduating in 1856. A year later, Garfield entered politics as a Republican. He married Lucretia Rudolph in 1858, and served as a member of the Ohio State Senate . Garfield opposed Confederate secession, served as a major general in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and fought in the battles of Middle Creek, Shiloh, and Chickamauga. He was first elected to Congress in 1862 to represent Ohio's 19th District. Throughout Garfield's extended congressional service after the Civil War, he firmly supported the gold standard and gained a reputation as a skilled orator. Garfield initially agreed with Radical Republican views regarding Reconstruction, but later favored a moderate approach for civil rights enforcement for freedmen.

At the 1880 Republican National Convention, Senator-elect Garfield attended as campaign manager for Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman, and gave the presidential nomination speech for him. When neither Sherman nor his rivals – Ulysses S. Grant and James G. Blaine – could get enough votes to secure the nomination, delegates chose Garfield as a compromise on the 36th ballot. In the 1880 presidential election, Garfield conducted a low-key front porch campaign, and narrowly defeated Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock.

Garfield's accomplishments as president included a resurgence of presidential authority against senatorial courtesy in executive appointments, energizing American naval power, and purging corruption in the Post Office, all during his extremely short time in office. Garfield made notable diplomatic and judicial appointments, including a U.S. Supreme Court justice. He enhanced the powers of the presidency when he defied the powerful New York senator Roscoe Conkling by appointing William H. Robertson to the lucrative post of Collector of the Port of New York, starting a fracas that ended with Robertson's confirmation and Conkling's resignation from the Senate. Garfield advocated agricultural technology, an educated electorate, and civil rights for African Americans. He also proposed substantial civil service reform, eventually passed by Congress in 1883 and signed into law by his successor, Chester A. Arthur, as the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.

On July 2, 1881, he was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington D.C. by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker. The wound was not immediately fatal for Garfield, but his doctors' uncleaned and unprotected hands are said to have led to infection that caused his death on September 19. Guiteau was convicted of the murder and was executed in June 1882; he tried to name his crime as simple assault by blaming the doctors for Garfield's death. With his term cut short by his death after only 200 days, and much of it spent in ill health trying to recover from the attack, Garfield is little-remembered other than for his assassination. Historians often forgo listing him in rankings of U.S. presidents due to the short length of his presidency.

✵ 19. November 1831 – 19. September 1881
James A. Garfield photo
James A. Garfield: 129   quotes 2   likes

James A. Garfield Quotes

“It is not manly to lie even about Satan.”

James A. Garfield

1880s, Garfield's Words (1882)

Lie

“Not in Chicago, in the heat of June, but at the ballot-boxes of the Republic, in the quiet of November, after the silence of deliberate judgment, will this question be settled. And now, gentlemen of the Convention, what do we want?”

James A. Garfield

1880s, Speech Nominating John Sherman for President (1880)

Question , Silence , Box

“If hard work is not another name for talent, it is the best possible substitute for it.”

James A. Garfield

"College Education," an address before the Literary the Eclectic Institute (June 1867), in President Garfield and Education : Hiram College Memorial (1881) by B. A. Hinsdale, p. 312 http://books.google.com/books?id=rA4XAAAAYAAJ
1860s

“Bear with me, fellow-citizens, while I urge still another consideration. By the Constitution, only three fifths of the slaves were counted in forming the basis of Congressional representation. The Proclamation of Emancipation adds the other two fifths, which at the next census will be more than two millions. If the negro be denied the franchise, and the size of the House of Representatives remain as now, we shall have fifteen additional members of Congress from the States lately in rebellion, without the addition of a single citizen to their population, and we shall have fifteen less in the loyal States. This will not only give six members of Congress to South Carolina, four sevenths of whose people are negroes, but it will place the power of the State, as well as the destiny of 412,000 black men, in the hands of the 20,000 white men, less than the number of voters in our own Congressional district, who, under the restricted suffrage of that undemocratic State, exercise the franchise. Such an unjust and unequal distribution of power would breed perpetual mischief. The evils of the rotten borough system of England would be upon us.”

James A. Garfield

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

Men , People , Exercises , Evil

“It is related in ancient fable that one of the gods, dissatisfied with the decrees of destiny, attempted to steal the box in which were kept the decrees of the Fates; but he found that it was fastened to the throne of Jupiter by a golden chain, and to remove it would pull down the pillars of heaven. So is the sacred ballot-box, which holds the decrees of freemen, linked by the indissoluble bond of necessity to the pillars of the Republic; and he who tampers with its decrees, or plucks it away from its place in our temple, will perish amid the ruins he has wrought.”

James A. Garfield

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

God , Fate , Box

“I am glad to have the opportunity of standing up against a rabble of men who hasten to make weathercocks of themselves.”

James A. Garfield

1880s, Garfield's Words (1882)

Men

“Enterprises of the highest importance to our moral and material well-being unite us and offer ample employment of our best powers. Let all our people, leaving behind them the battlefields of dead issues, move forward and in their strength of liberty and the restored Union win the grander victories of peace.”

James A. Garfield

1880s, Inaugural address (1881)

People , Peace , Victory , Dead

“Ideas control the world.”

James A. Garfield

John Wingate Thornton, The historical relation of New England to the English Commonwealth (1875), p. 46
Misattributed
Variant: Ideas control the world.

World , Idea

“I am a poor hater.”

James A. Garfield

Diary (26 April 1876) as quoted in Garfield (1978) by Allen Peskin, Ch. 13
1870s

“A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck. ”

James A. Garfield

“Right reason is stronger than force.”

James A. Garfield

“A brave man is a man who dares to look the Devil in the face and tell him he is a Devil. ”

James A. Garfield

“Gentlemen, ideas outlive men; ideas outlive all earthly things. You who fought in the war for the Union fought for immortal ideas, and by their might you crowned the war with victory.”

James A. Garfield

[Great applause.] But victory was worth nothing except for the truths that were under it, in it, and above it. We meet tonight as comrades to stand guard around the sacred truths for which we fought. [Loud and prolonged cheers.] And while we have life to meet and grasp the hand of a comrade, we will stand by the great truths of the war. ["Good," "good," and loud cheers.] Many convictions have sunk so deep into our hearts that we can never forget them. Think of the elevating spirit of the war itself. We gathered the boys from all our farms and shops and stores and schools and homes, from all over the Republic. They went forth unknown to fame, but returned enrolled on the roster of immortal heroes. [Great applause.] They went in the spirit of the soldiers of Henry at Agincourt, of whom he said. 'For he today that sheds his blood with me. Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile. This day shall gentle his condition.'
1880s, Speech to the 'Boys in Blue' (1880)

War , Victory , Idea , Men

“I would rather be beaten in Right than succeed in Wrong.”

James A. Garfield

Source: Maxims of James Abram Garfield (1880), compiled by William Ralston Balch, p. 1