James A. Garfield Quotes

Hear reason, or she'll make you feel her.

Persuasion is often more effectual than force.

The best way to win an argument is to begin by being right.

Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.

If you are strong, and if you have a strong logic, you can convince people by your ideas. Torture means your logic is very weak, so you need power to impose on others.

Force is legitimate where gentleness avails not.

A noble heart will always capitulate to reason.

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.

It isn't right to judge strength as better than good wisdom.

You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.

You might just as well read the Bible to a herd of buffaloes as to those fellows ... but they have a supreme respect for the logic ... embodied in Sharp's rifles .

Lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

… morality ends where the gun begins.

There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.

Reason is not measured by size or height, but by principle.

I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

You may have the might, but that does not necessarily make you right.