A bad cause will never be supported by bad means and bad men.
A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.
Great causes and little men go ill together.
If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what you will, is the great high-road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause.
In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.
It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by ;degrees, the consequences will be the same.
It is only after an unknown number of unrecorded labors, after a host of noble hearts have succumbed in discouragement, convinced that ;their cause is lost; it is only then that cause triumphs.
It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you (a) become really committed to winning, and (b) become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.
Life is not an easy matter. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Men are blind in their own cause.
No cause is helpless if it is just. Errors, no matter how popular, carry the seeds of their own destruction.
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.
Ours is an abiding faith in the cause of human freedom. We know it is God's cause.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Respectable men and women content with good and easy living are missing some of the most important things in life. Unless you give ;yourself to some great cause you haven't even begun to live.
Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.
The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.