Leadership Quote by James A. Garfield

Four words, no wiggle room: Garfield frames suicide as a category error. Not a tragedy to be aestheticized, not a brave exit, not even a “solution” with a dark cost-benefit logic. Just not a remedy. That medical metaphor matters. A remedy is supposed to heal, to restore the patient to life; suicide, by definition, ends the very subject it claims to relieve. In a culture that often reaches for soothing euphemisms, Garfield refuses comfort language and replaces it with a hard diagnostic boundary.

Coming from a U.S. president, the line also reads as civic rhetoric, not only private counsel. Leaders are expected to speak in the grammar of resilience because their words become social permissions. Calling suicide a “remedy” would validate it as rational self-treatment, an option on the menu when pain spikes. Garfield’s blunt negation tries to close that door. The subtext is paternal and moral without being ornate: suffering is real, but self-destruction isn’t an answer the community can endorse.

Context sharpens the urgency. Garfield’s era romanticized certain forms of death while offering few modern supports for mental illness. Public life prized stoicism; despair was often treated as a personal failure or a sin. His phrasing sidesteps theological argument and goes straight to practical consequence: you cannot cure misery by eliminating the person who feels it. It’s a public-health insight disguised as plain speech, and its power is the restraint - a president using the smallest possible sentence to draw the largest possible line.