Quotes from Edmund Morris

We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism Ã¢â'¬Â¦ 

I told him he must treat the political audience as one coming, not to see an etching, but a poster," he said to Jusserand and Archie Butt. "He must, therefore, have streaks of blue, yellow, and red to catch the eye, and eliminate all fine lines and soft colors.

ON FRIDAY, 25 August, Roosevelt shocked most of his countrymen by dropping to the floor of Long Island Sound in one of the Navy's six new submarines, appropriately named the Plunger. He remained beneath the surface (lashed with heavy rain) long enough to watch fish swim past his window. Then, taking the controls, he essayed a few movements himself, including one which brought the ship to the surface rear end up.

Later he wrote to Lodge: I don't grudge the broken arm a bit...I'm always ready to pay the piper when I've had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.

Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906]

Roosevelt conceded that "some of the evils of which you complain are real and can be to a certain degree remedied, but not by the remedies you propose." But most would disappear if there were more of "that capacity for steady, individual self-help which is the glory of every true American." Legislation could no more do away with them "than you could do away with the bruises which you receive when you tumble down, by passing an act to repeal the laws of gravitation.

Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as a dangerous and ominous jingo, and the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.

Just because we cannot stop all the large leaks, that is no reason why we should open up all the little ones." T. Roosevelt

It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions.

Corporate cunning has developed faster than the laws of nation and state," he remarked to the reporter Lindsay Denison. "Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.

We had no longing for excessive wealth: a mere competency, though earned by daily toil, so that it was reasonably sure, and free from the drag of continued indebtedness to others, was all we coveted.

Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals.

As for the accusation that he, Roosevelt, belonged to the landlord class, "if you had any conception of the true American spirit you would know that we do not have 'classes' at all on this side of the water.

Except for the two years he had lived with cowboys in North Dakota,and being the employer of a dozen or so servants,Roosevelt had never had to suffer any prolonged intimacy with the working class.From infancy,he had enjoyed the perquisites of money and social position.The money,through his own mismanagement,had often run short,and he was by no means wealthy even now, but he had always taken exclusivity for granted.

Nine out of ten beer drinkers are decent and reputable citizens," Roosevelt declared. "That large class of Americans who have adopted the German customs in regard to drinking ales and beers Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are in the main Ã¢â'¬Â¦ law-abiding.

There goes the most remarkable man I ever met. Unless I am badly mistaken, the world is due to hear from him one of these days.

The reason that he knew so much about everything, I found, was that wherever he went he got right in with the people 

Doctor," came the reply, "I'm going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I've got to live the sort of life you have described, I don't care how short it is.

Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe--not to mention the maquettes in Rodin's studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

Immersion in no way affected Roosevelt's cheerful volubility. I never saw a man who talked so much, Rondon marveled. I used to love to watch him think...for he always gesticulated. He would be alone, not saying a word, yet his hands would be moving, and he would be waving his arms and nodding his head with the greatest determination, as though arguing with somebody else.

Conservatives, he said, "are taught to believe that change means destruction. They are wrong.… Life means change; where there is no change, death comes.

Of all broken reeds," Roosevelt declared, "sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.

Thanks to herculean skinning and salting by Heller and Mearns, he can congratulate himself on having shipped, via the railway to Mombasa, "a collection of large animals such as has never been obtained for any other museum in the world on a single trip." The

Edison averaged one patent for every ten to twelve days of his adult life.