Quotes by Theodore Roosevelt:
"We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill."
— "The Strenuous Life" speech, April 10, 1899
"If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all things, and had acted upon their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country those months of doom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore the sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let us, the children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations."
— "The Strenuous Life" speech, April 10, 1899
"A sound body is good; a sound mind is better; but a strong and clean character is better than either."
— Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School, May 24, 1904
"The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything."
— As quoted by Jacob A. Riis, Theodore Roosevelt: The Citizen, 1904
"This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country."
— October 25, 1905
"To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed."
— State of the Union address, December 3, 1907
"Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths."
— Letter to Mr. J.C. Martin, November 6, 1908
"The corporate manager who achieves success by honest efficiency in giving the best service to the public should be favored because we all benefit by his efficiency. […] he should be helped by the Government because his success is good for the National welfare. But a man who grasps and holds business power by breaking the industrial efficiency of others, who wins success by methods which are against the public interest and degrading to the public morals, should not be permitted to exercise such power. Instead of punishing him by a long and doubtful process of the law after the wrong has been com- mitted, there should be such effective Government regulation as to check the evil tendencies at the moment that they start do develop."
— The Progressives, Past and Present, 1910
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
— Citizenship in a Republic, April 23, 1910 — frequently quoted as "The Man in the Arena"
Quotes about Theodore Roosevelt:
"Death had to take him in his sleep, for if he was awake there'd have been a fight."
— Vice President Thomas R. Marshall
"Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy."
— Bram Stoker, 1895
"Don't any of you realize that there's only one life between that madman and the presidency?"
"I don't believe it! The goddamn cowboy's president!"
"I don't believe it! The goddamn cowboy's president!"
— RNC Chairman Mark Hanna, before and after William McKinley was assassinated, making Roosevelt the next president.
