“I can truly say I had rather be a Mount Vernon than to be attended at the Seat of Government by the Officers of State and the Representatives of every Power in Europe.”
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George Washington
“No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.”
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George Washington
“Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”
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George Washington
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
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George Washington
“Be not glad at the misfortune of another, though he may be your enemy.”
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George Washington
“Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.”
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George Washington
“Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
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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
“[death]...the abyss from where no traveler is permitted to return”
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George Washington
“Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also - if you love them enough”
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George Washington
“George Washington famously warned against ... 'ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear”
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George Washington
“There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
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George Washington
“Let your conversation be without malice or envy, for it is a sign of a tractable and commendable nature; and in all cases of passion admit reason to govern.”
―
George Washington
