Roosevelt One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged. If I owe Smith ten dollars, and God forgives me, that doesn't pay Smith. Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness. The American public would forgive me anything except running off with Eddie Fisher. The weak can never forgive.
Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse. In the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves. You have everything but one thing, madness. A man needs a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope and be free. I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from Heaven.