Quotes from Edmund Morris

Diplomacy, Roosevelt insisted, is utterly useless when there is no force behind it; the diplomat is the servant, not the master of the soldier.

He saw at once that the crowd "was filled with whooping enthusiasm and every kind of whiskey," and that a riot might ensue if either camp felt slighted.

up to MacManus, who towered over him, he hissed, "I hear you are going to toss me in a blanket. By God! if you try anything like that, I'll kick you, I'll bite you, I'll kick you in the balls, I'll do anything to you—you'd better leave me alone." This speech had the desired effect.38

Here is the thing you must bear in mind," Roosevelt said, clearly irritated. "I do not represent public opinion: I represent the public. There is a wide difference between the two, between the real interests of the public, and the public's opinion of these interests. I must represent not the excited opinion of the West, but the real interests of the whole people.

An autocrat's a ruler that does what th' people wants an' takes th' blame f'r it.

Newlywed couples strolled the Mall—Washington now outranked Niagara as a sexual shrine

a bill banning railroad rebates to large industrial companies

has a very decided character, has a strongly accentuated career, it is normally the case of course that he makes ardent friends and bitter enemies."19

All that is most valuable can be had for nothing. They come as presents from the hand of the Creator, and neither air nor sky, nor beauty, genius, health, or strength, can be bought or sold.

More clearly than almost any other statesman he beheld the grandeur of the nation loom up, vast and shadowy, through the coming years.

He is a great big boy, Wilson said. There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can't resist the man. I can easily understand why his followers are so fond of him.

To be neutral13 between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

He plunged at once into the somewhat rodent-like life of a professional historian.

Being congenitally unable to function unless he had some symbols of evil to attack, Roosevelt looked about him for an opponent. As usual he selected the biggest and nearest. "I think I shall move against Byrnes at once," he told Lodge on 18 May. "I thoroughly distrust him, and cannot do any thorough work while he remains.49

Any black or red man who could win admission to "the fellowship of the doers" was superior to the white man who failed. Roosevelt's long-term dream was nothing more or less than the general, steady, self-betterment of the multicolored American nation.

T]he one plain duty of every man is to face the future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store for him, turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play his part manfully, as a man among men.

Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy.

That dude," he snorted. "The damn fool, he would tread on his own balls just as quick as he would on his neighbor's

Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult matter

Time will have his little scar, But the wound won't last.

I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities he appears."106

It is not22 a good thing for a country to have a professional yodeler, a human trombone like Mr. Bryan as secretary of state, nor a college president with an astute and shifty mind, a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people … and no real knowledge or wisdom concerning internal and international affairs as head of the nation.

Le Chasseur des solitudes).

What I cannot understand about the Russian," Roosevelt complained, "is the way he will lie when he knows perfectly well that you know he is lying.