"My fundamental idea of both private and public business came first from my father. He had the strong New England trait of great repugnance at seeing anything wasted. He was a generous and charitable man, but he regarded waste as a moral wrong, Wealth comes from industry, and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity. This is by no means a doctrine of parsimony. Both men and nations should live in accordance with their means and devote their substance not only to productive industry, but to the creation of the various forms of beauty and the pursuit of culture which give adornments to the art of life."
RE: Coolidge might have been the best writer
He was also a very unassuming man.
Coolidge and his vivacious wife Grace were invited to quite a few parties, where the legend of “Silent Cal” was born.
It was from this time most of the jokes and anecdotes involving Coolidge originate.
Although Coolidge was known to be a skilled and effective public speaker, in private he was a man of few words and was therefore commonly referred to as “Silent Cal.”
A possibly apocryphal story has it that Dorothy Parker, seated next to him at a dinner, said to him, “Mr. Coolidge, I’ve made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you.” His famous reply: “You lose.”
It was also Parker who, upon learning that Coolidge had died, reportedly remarked, “How can they tell?”
Alice Roosevelt Longworth supposedly once commented that, “He looks as if he’d been weaned on a pickle.”
Coolidge often seemed uncomfortable among fashionable Washington society; when asked why he continued to attend so many of their dinner parties, he replied, “Got to eat somewhere.