Theodore Roosevelt Quotes (163 Quotes)


    The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.



    When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer "Present" or "Not guilty."

    To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.


    War is not merely justifiable, but imperative upon honorable men, upon an honorable nation, where peace can only be obtained by the sacrifice of conscientious conviction or of national welfare



    If I must choose between peace and righteousness, I choose righteousness




    A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have.

    There never has been devised, and there never will be devised, any law which will enable a man to succeed save by the exercise of those qualities which have always been the prerequisites of success the qualities of hard work, of keen intelligence, of unflinching will.

    The person who succeeds is not the one who holds back, fearing failure, nor the one who never fails... but rather the one who moves on im spite of failure. Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat. Author Teddy Roosevelt.

    If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.

    The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

    The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

    No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

    He told me that when (Ralph Waldo) Emerson came to California, (Muir) tried to get him to come out and camp with him, for that was the only way in which to see at their best the majesty and charm of the Sierras, ... Theodore Roosevelt An Autobiography.

    The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens.


    Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

    Willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death a sin for which there is no atonement. No man, no woman, can shirk the primary duties of life, whether for love of ease and pleasure, or for any other cause, and retain his or her self-respect.



    In the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrong doing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

    If we do not protect the environment now, we cannot ensure a strong nation for our children, ... If we do not act today, many of these lands will be gone.

    Aggressive fighting for the right is the greatest sport in the world.

    We can have no '50-50' allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

    I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

    In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is Hit the line hard.

    The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.

    One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called ''weasel words.'' When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a ''weasel word'' after another there is nothing left of the other.

    Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another's keeping.


    The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

    There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

    the one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight. . . It should be the growing nation with a future which takes the long look ahead.

    The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life

    The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.

    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 thembetter. 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 and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcomings but who does actually strive to do thedeed who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end thetriumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be withthose cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

    The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.


    Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

    The world wants the kind of men who do not shrink from temporary defeats in life but come again and wrestle triumph from defeat.

    The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

    Though conditions have grown puzzling in their complexity, though changes have been vast, yet we may remain absolutely sure of one thing that now as ever in the past, and as it will ever be in-the future, there can be no substitute for elemental virtues, for the elemental qualities to which we allude when we speak of a man, not only as a good man, but as emphatically a man. We can build up the standard of individual citizenship and individual well-being, we can raise the national standard and make it what it can and shall be made, only by each of us steadfastly keeping in mind that there can be no substitute for the world-old commonplace qualities of truth, justice, and courage, thrift, industry, common sense and genuine sympathy with the fellow feelings of others.

    At sometime in our lives a devil dwells within us, causes heartbreaks, confusion and troubles, then dies.



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    Thomas Jefferson - Theodore Roosevelt - Ronald Reagan - Franklin D. Roosevelt - Woodrow Wilson - Ulysses S. Grant - James Monroe - Herbert Hoover - Gerald R. Ford - Calvin Coolidge


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