“Associate yourself with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for ‘tis better to be alone than in bad company.”
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George Washington
“We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience. ”
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George Washington
“A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.”
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George Washington
“I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind.
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George Washington
“Unhappy it is, though, to reflect that a brother's sword has been sheathed in a brother's breast and that the once-happy plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?”
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George Washington
“Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a person’s own mind, than on the externals in the world.”
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George Washington
“A special act of Congress enabled King to take his oath of office in Cuba—the only President or Vice President to be sworn in outside the United States—later in March. King returned home to Alabama in early April and died two days later, the only Vice President to never make it to the national capital during his term of office.”
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George Washington
“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.”
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George Washington
“Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”
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George Washington
“Wherein you reprove another be unblameable yourself, for example is more prevalent than precepts.”
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George Washington
“[T]he gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, though they differ in shape.”
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George Washington
“I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.”
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George Washington
“if to please the people,we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The rest is in the hands of God.”
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George Washington
“It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.”
―
George Washington
