Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

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

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

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.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.

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

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

When you play, play hard; when you work, don't play at all.

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.

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

This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.

Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft.

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 at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

Our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

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.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.

Politeness [is] a sign of dignity, not subservience.

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.

Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.

I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

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.

Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainly that class's own worst enemy.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.

In life, as in football, the principle to follow is to hit the line hard.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

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

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.

The worst of all fears is the fear of living

Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage.

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

No man is above the law, and no man is below it.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased; and not impaired in value.

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.

There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased; and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as it does protection.

All the resources we need are in the mind.

I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.

If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

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

Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.

With self-discipline most anything is possible.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. 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.

The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.

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.

It is better to be faithful than famous.

Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk; we must act big.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.

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 spirit of brotherhood recognizes of necessity both the need of self-help and also the need of helping others in the only way which every ultimately does great god, that is, of helping them to help themselves

The great virtue of my radicalism lies in the fact that I am perfectly ready, if necessary, to be radical on the conservative side.

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.

Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high purpose. Power undirected by high purpose spells calamity, and high purpose by itself is utterly useless if the power to put it into effect is lacking.

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

My hat's in the ring. The fight is on and I'm stripped to the buff.

If I have erred, I err in company with Abraham Lincoln.

The only tyrannies from which men, women and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities.

The men and women who have the right ideals . . . are those who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty.

Conservation and rural-life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at the bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily given for the future.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else

It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

I want to see you shoot the way you shout.

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.

If I have to choose between peace and righteousness, I'll choose righteousness.