Quotes from Theodore Roosevelt

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.

Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don't have the strength.

When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on

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

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.

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 reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

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

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

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

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.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

The men with the muckrakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them…. If they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck their power of usefulness is gone.

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.

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.

Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.

I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

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

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

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

The lunatic fringe in all reform movements.

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.