NICHOLAS M. BUTLER

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

Necessity does the work of courage.

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

America is the best half-educated country in the world.

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

Many peoples' tombstones should read 'Died at 30, burried at 60.'

An educated proletariat is a constant source of disturbance and danger to any nation.

Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives.

If the minds of men can be turned even for a short time away from passion, race antagonism and from national aggrandizement to a contemplation of the individual and … to the shocking horrors which modern warfare entails, a step, and by no means a short one, will have been taken towards the substitution of justice for force in the settlement of institutional differences.

The characteristic feature of the experiment in Russia ... is not that it is communist, but that it is being carried on with a plan in the face of a planless opposition.

Presidents are not elected in these crowded halls, with cheering thousands. They are elected by the fireside in November.

The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

... as long as there is no chance of my being elected Vice President.

Why you might just as well put poison in the food of every American boy that goes to his transport as to permit that man to talk as he does.

Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.

The modern university does not exist to teach alone...It exists also to serve the democracy of which it is a product and an ornament...The university rests on the public will and on public appreciation.

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

The forty-four-hour week has no charm for me. I'm looking for a forty-hour day.

The more that one studies the history of the building of the American nation, the clearer it becomes that it may be justly described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the world problems of tomorrow.

Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.

The old world order changed when this war-storm broke. The old international order passed away as suddenly, as unexpectedly, and as completely as if it had been wiped out by a gigantic flood, by a great tempest, or by a volcanic eruption. The old world order died with the setting of that day's sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow.

To exclude religious teaching altogether from education... is a very dangerous and curious tendency. The result is to give paganism a new importance and influence.

The epitaphs on tombstones of a great many people should read: Died at thirty, and buried at sixty.

The fifth freedom, the Freedom of Individual Enterprise, is the keystone of the arch on which the other Four Freedoms rest. This is what freedom means.