Quotes from Theodore Roosevelt

I have always been fond of Josh Billings's remark that "it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent." There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey.

Father is strength at home, strength in government and strength overseas. Mother represents upbringing, education, the spread of civilization. Children are the lower classes, the lower races, to be brought to maturity and then set free

If we say of a boy or a man, "He is of good character," we mean that he does not do a great many things that are wrong, and we also mean that he does do a great many things which imply much effort of will and readiness to face what is disagreeable. He must not steal, he must not be intemperate, he must not be vicious in any way; he must not be mean or brutal; he must not bully the weak. In fact, he must refrain from whatever is evil. But besides refraining from evil, he must do good.

We] all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.

We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.

The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion.

Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another's keeping.

Let these innocent people be careful not to invest in corporations where those in control are not men of probity, men who respect the laws; above all let them avoid the men who make it their one effort to evade or defy the laws.

There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American.  The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.  We are a nation, not a hodge-podge of foreign nationalities.  We are a people, and not a polyglot boarding house.

To educate a person without teaching ethics is to create a menace to society.

Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.

It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.  We are a nation, not a hodge-podge of foreign nationalities.  We are a people, and not a polyglot boarding house.

It is inexcusable to refuse to work, to work slackly or perversely, or to mar the work of others.

The problems differ from generation to generation, but the qualities needed to solve them remain unchanged from world's end to world's end

In advocating any measure we must consider not only its justice but its practicability.

Practical efficiency is common, and lofty idealism not uncommon; it is the combination which is necessary, and the combination is rare.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of Decency.

While President, I have been President, emphatically; I have used every ounce of power there was in the office.…I do not believe that any President ever had as thoroughly good a time as I have had, or has ever enjoyed himself as much.

There! you will think this a dreadfully preaching letter! I suppose I have a natural tendency to preach just at present because I am overwhelmed with my work.

I was not going to earn money, I must even things up by not spending it.

There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake.

training in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.