Quotes from Edmund Morris

Washburn noticed how courteous the Colonel was to servants, and how he talked with equal animation about his gardener and the King of Italy.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Wednesday, Hendricks telephoned acceptance, and on Friday afternoon Roosevelt joyfully released news of the nomination to the press. Privately, to his old Assembly colleague Henry L. Sprague, he wrote: "I have always been fond of the West African proverb: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.' Ã¢â'¬Â28

In El Paso," the President said approvingly, "the people are homicidal but orthodox.

BECAUSE ROOSEVELT WAS9, in the image of Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia University, "polygonal," visitors saw only certain facets of his personality at any given time.

whether the American people knew where they were driving." He suspected they did not, "but that they might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.

Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.

He castigates his habitual targets, "the dull, the feeble, and the timid good," and proclaims himself a strong man, careless of class, color, or party politics. "If I find a public servant who is dishonest, I will chop his head off if he is the highest Republican in this municipality!

The flood became an embarrassment for Roosevelt. Did all these men imagine they were buying him? "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.

Roosevelt followed it8 with a quirky essay in The Outlook entitled "Dante and the Bowery," arguing that literary stylists had grown too precious in eschewing contemporary imagery. There was as much epic grandeur and poignant example to be found in modern life, he suggested, as there was in Greek myth, or for that matter, thirteenth-century cosmology.

Well, we seem to have it.

I think," Philander Knox teased, "it would be better to keep your action free from any taint of legality.

More than any other previous occupant of the White House, Roosevelt understood that the way to manipulate reporters was to let them imagine they were helping shape policy. A "consultation" here, a confidence shared there, and the scribe was transformed into a pen for hire.

Man with the Muckrake

There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty

Here, too, were dozens of troopers whom Roosevelt knew only by their contradictory nicknames: "Metropolitan Bill" the frontiersman, "Nigger" the near-albino, "Pork Chop" the Jew, jocular "Weeping Dutchman," foul-mouthed "Prayerful James," and "Rubber Shoe Andy," the noisiest scout in Cuba.59

We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.

The Constitution was made for the people and not the people for the Constitution.

If he was less motivated by compassion than anger at what he saw as the arrogance of capital,he chafed,nonetheless,to regulate it.

All things come to him who hustles while he waits.

The child was born at a quarter to eight, emerging so easily that neither chloroform nor instruments were needed.

As Grover Cleveland remarked, "When quarreling parties are both in the wrong, and are assailed with blame Ã¢â'¬Â¦ they will do strange things to save their faces.

In 1902, the Senator had been banned from the White House for punching out a colleague, mid-debate.

He is recognized as the world authority on big American game mammals, and is an ornithologist of some note. Stooping to pick a speck of brown fluff off the White House lawn, he will murmur, "Very early for a fox sparrow!"84

LOOK NOW, IN YOUR IGNORANCE, ON THE FACE OF DEATH.