Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

528 Sourced Quotes

All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law

Theodore Roosevelt
In other words, character is far more important than intellect to the race as to the individual. We need intellect, and there is no reason why we should not have it together with character; but if we must choose between the two we choose character without a moment's hesitation.

Theodore Roosevelt
When liberty becomes license, some form of one-man power is not far distant.

Theodore Roosevelt
All that the law can do is to shape things so that no injustice shall be done by one to the other, and that each man shall be given the first chance to show the stuff that is in him.

Theodore Roosevelt
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.

Theodore Roosevelt
Men can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others.

Theodore Roosevelt
After the war, and until the day of his death, his position on almost every public question was either mischievous or ridiculous, and usually both.

Theodore Roosevelt
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.

Theodore Roosevelt
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.

Theodore Roosevelt
Avoid the base hypocrisy of condemning in one man what you pass over in silence when committed by another.

Theodore Roosevelt
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.

Theodore Roosevelt
The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.

Theodore Roosevelt
There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility.

Theodore Roosevelt
Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.

Theodore Roosevelt
A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace.

Theodore Roosevelt
The effort to make financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from entering the public service at any price.

Theodore Roosevelt
Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people today, but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.

Theodore Roosevelt
I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision...I enjoyed the life to the full.

Theodore Roosevelt
The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men, their greed and arrogance, and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition.

Theodore Roosevelt
Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me then you will steal from me.

Theodore Roosevelt
Some reformers may urge that in the ages distant future, patriotism, like the habit of monogamous marriage, will become a needless and obsolete virtue; but just at present the man who loves other countries as much as he does his own is quite as noxious a member of society as the man who loves other women as much as he loves his wife. Love of country is an elemental virtue, like love of home.

Theodore Roosevelt
A good Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guaranty of peace.

Theodore Roosevelt
There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.

Theodore Roosevelt
In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts.

Theodore Roosevelt
In a civilized and cultivated country wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. the excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wild life, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.

Theodore Roosevelt
Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those shown themselves worthy of it.

Theodore Roosevelt
We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the man of capital than evil in the man of no capital.

Theodore Roosevelt
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.

Theodore Roosevelt
When great nations fear to expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their greatness is coming to an end. Are we, still in the prime of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to take our place with the weak and the craven? A thousand times no!

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

Theodore Roosevelt