Quotes from Edmund Morris

It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them.

Norway...looked to Roosevelt "as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe....It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.

Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.

Bram Stoker] wrote in his diary: "Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy.

Speaker Reed's] wit was brilliant and usually cruel... Asked to attend the funeral of a political enemy, he refused, "but that does not mean to say I do not heartily approve of it.

The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

Theodore," [Theodore Sr] said, eschewing boyish nicknames, "you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it.

Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.

Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world's resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature.

He has,in short,reached his peak as a hunter,exuberantly altered from the pale,overweight statesman of ten months ago. Africa's way of reducing every problem of existence to dire alternatives-shoot or starve,kill or be killed,shelter or suffer,procreate or count for nothing-has clarified his thinking,purged him of politics and its constant search for compromise.

Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.

I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.

To live, for him, has no meaning other than to drive oneself, to act with all one's strength. An existence without stress, without struggle, without growth has always struck him as mindless. Those who remain on the sidelines he sees as cowards, and consequently his personal enemies.

For once, he could look back at the past without regret, and at the future without bewilderment. Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: "I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them.

Roosevelt gazed around the library. A glint in his spectacles betrayed displeasure. Loeb came up inquiringly, and there was a whispered conversation in which the words newspapermen and sufficient room were audible. Hurrying outside, Loeb returned with two dozen delighted scribes. They proceeded to report the subsequent ceremony with a wealth of detail unmatched in the history of presidential inaugurations.

It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business.… No amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.

In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others.

As if toughening himself for the crisis to come, Roosevelt intensified his latest exercise routine, "singlesticks." Every evening in the residence, he and Leonard Wood donned padded helmets and chest protectors and beat each other like carpets. "We look like Tweedledum and Tweedle dee," the President joked.

One person who met him during these dark days was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. After watching Roosevelt in action at a literary dinner table, and afterward dispensing summary justice in the police courts, Stoker wrote in his diary: "Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy.

We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.

If a man 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.

Indeed, until one tries it for himself, it is incredible what dignity there is in an old hat, what virtue in a time-worn coat, and how savory the dinner-table can be made without sirloin steaks and cranberry tarts.

It is true, as the champions of the extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.