Hoover Quotes

“There is no double standard of morals, one in public and one in private life. Self-government in people decays when moral standards in the people fail. Moral standards in the people are sullied when moral leadership in government fails. It is alone the spirit of morals that can reconcile order and freedom. A people corrupted by their government cannot remain a free people.”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“It was a strange world, he continued, where Soviet expansionism could be called, in the Yalta definition, “establishing a broad democratic basis,” and where a single-party government that used secret police to educate its citizenry qualified as a democracy. It was stranger still when a leader could be called a dictator—the fascist Perón of Argentina was one, the fascist Vargas of Brazil was not—depending on his usefulness to U.S. foreign policy.18 These complaints were appended to Hoover’s larger catalog of the new liberalism’s sins: empty sloganeering, duplicitous policies, arrogant economic planning, sprawling bureaucracies, the buying of people with their own money, the creation of dependencies on the state, intolerance of opposition, the rewriting of history, the use of whipping boys to evade accountability, the turning of citizens against one another by promotion of class division, and an overarching belief, evident in the court-packing episode, that “the objective,” to use a favorite New Deal term, justified the means.19 These all became proofs in Hoover’s larger argument about the increasingly manipulative, overbearing nature of government, and the resulting degradation of public morals and true liberty:”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“The main anchor of our civilization must be intellectual and spiritual liberty. Ideals, invention, initiative, enterprise, and leadership spring best from free men and women. The only economic system which will not limit or destroy these forces of progress is private enterprise.17”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“We cannot increase standards of living by restricting production. We cannot spend ourselves into prosperity. We cannot hate ourselves into it either. We cannot constantly increase costs of production without increasing prices and therefore decreasing consumption and employment. We cannot place punitive taxes on industry without stifling new enterprise and jobs.14”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“Hoover’s new line was that the planned economy had resulted in “two families in every garage.”8”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“There will always be a frontier to conquer or to hold as long as men think, plan, and dare….There are continents of human welfare of which we have penetrated only the coastal plain. The great continent of science is as yet explored only on its borders, and it is only the pioneer who will penetrate the frontier in the quest for new worlds to conquer.30”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“Less Government in Business and More Business in Government.”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“a balance between fairly intelligent business and intelligently fair government.”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“Taking a compound of definitions coming out of Washington, the impression would be that the Tories do the money changing. The Reactionaries are members of well-warmed and well-stocked clubs. The Conservatives are greedily trying to keep their jobs and their savings. The Liberals have the exclusive right to define the opinions of others. The Radicals do not know what to do but do it in every direction.”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“doom Hoover’s campaign. He”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“[Warren] Harding diligently worked the knots of America's body politic from the moment he took office, soothing conservatives by resizing the federal government for peacetime and adopting a pro-business outlook, soothing his Republican base by raising tariffs and lowering taxes, soothing the left by releasing from prison the socialist icon Eugene Debs and other radicals rounded up during Palmer's Red Scare, soothing the battered farm belt with an emergency tariff and federal protection for farm cooperatives, soothing labor with public works programs to ease unemployment and by cajoling the steel industry into abandoning its inhumane practice of twelve-hour shifts. Harding soothed the isolationist and nativist majority in America with tighter immigration policies and a foreign policy emphasizing legitimate national interests over crusading idealism. He soothed international tensions by normalizing relations with Germany and other former enemy states, and by convincing the world's leading naval powers to reduce tonnage at his Washington Disarmament Conference, the first gathering of its kind and a remarkable, unexpected success.”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times