Quotes from Edmund Morris

Roosevelt was relieved to hear the good news. "I don't care a damn about stocks and bonds, but I don't want to see them go down the first day I am President!

Black care," Roosevelt wrote, "rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.

They never open their mouths," he complained of two House colleagues, "without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." Asked

Everyone knew that the RNC had decided to field a losing candidate in November, rather than gamble on one who would radicalize its traditional platform.

to manufacture sensations.

demonstrators against bloodsports are "logical vegetarians of the flabbiest Hindoo type." President

straight into the ambush de Morès

A poet," he liked to say, "can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.

About as thorough-paced a scoundrel as I ever saw," Roosevelt declared. "An oily-Gammon, churchgoing specimen."45

It is a sheer waste of time for these people Ã¢â'¬Â¦ to threaten me with defeat for the Presidency next year. Nothing would hire me even to accept the Presidency if I had to take it on terms which would mean a forfeiting of self-respect.

For the next two weeks he stayed home while she "convalesced," reading to her and trying to conceal his renewed worries about money.87 The time for their general move to Washington was approaching; how he would finance it he simply did not know.

Theodore," Edith remarked, after he collided with the Sagamore Hill windmill, "I wish you'd do your bleeding in the bathroom.")

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere.

the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.

He might have to spend the rest of his presidency answering to the two classes of people always most vociferous in hard times: the bewildered and the guilty.

There may be honest differences of opinion as to many government policies; but surely there can be no such differences as to the need of unflinching perseverance in the war against successful dishonesty.

Somewhere between six one evening and eight-thirty next morning, beside his dressing and his dinner and his guests and his sleep, he had read a volume of three-hundred-and-odd pages, and

Do not all these things interest you? Isn't it a fine thing to be alive when so many great things are happening?

When a judge decides a constitutional question, when he decides what the people as a whole can and cannot do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think that it is wrong. We should hold the judiciary in all respect, but it is both absurd and degrading to make a fetish of a judge or of any one else.

entirely unprincipled, with the same idea of Public Life and Civil Service that a vulture has of a dead sheep.

he is the most dangerous foe to human liberty that has ever set foot on American soil."16

Actually Roosevelt was identifying with Euripides—like himself, an upper-class celebrant of middle-class virtues

Members of the White House Gang admit to "queer sensations" at the sight of this great barrel bearing down upon them, and half expect it to burst out of the Presidential shirt. Roosevelt

In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: "The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.