Edmund Morris Quotes

#1. Most of the members are positively corrupt, and the others are really singularly incompetent.

Edmund Morris

#2. Norway ... looked to Roosevelt as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe ... It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.

Edmund Morris

#3. Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.

Edmund Morris

#4. We had no longing for excessive wealth: a mere competency, though earned by daily toil, so that it was reasonably sure, and free from the drag of continued indebtedness to others, was all we coveted.

Edmund Morris

#5. There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty,

Edmund Morris

#6. much of a muchness.

Edmund Morris

#7. Just because we cannot stop all the large leaks, that is no reason why we should open up all the little ones."
T. Roosevelt

Edmund Morris

#8. Doctor," came the reply, "I'm going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I've got to live the sort of life you have described, I don't care how short it is." Having spat the wormwood out,

Edmund Morris

#9. [Bram Stoker] wrote in his diary: Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy.

Edmund Morris

#10. We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.

Edmund Morris

#11. Man with the Muckrake

Edmund Morris

#12. 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.

Edmund Morris

#13. Unless wealth was chastened by culture or regulated by government, it was at worst predatory, at best boring.

Edmund Morris

#14. There are floods of praise coming in as well as criticism.

Edmund Morris

#15. Ensconced, he (Roosevelt) lacked some of the neuroses of progressives-economic envy and race hatred especially.His radicalism was a matter of energy rather than urgency.

Edmund Morris

#16. Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906]

Edmund Morris

#17. In El Paso," the President said approvingly, "the people are homicidal but orthodox.

Edmund Morris

#18. What worried Roosevelt was the inability of ordinary people to see the danger of this proliferation of cogs and cylinders and coins in American life.23 The corrupt power of corporations was increasing at an alarming rate,

Edmund Morris

#19. It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions.

Edmund Morris

#20. Later he wrote to Lodge: I don't grudge the broken arm a bit ... I'm always ready to pay the piper when I've had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.

Edmund Morris

#21. [Speaker Reed's] wit was brilliant and usually cruel ... Asked to attend the funeral of a political enemy, he refused, but that does not mean to say I do not heartily approve of it.

Edmund Morris

#22. Indeed, until one tries it for himself, it is incredible what dignity there is in an old hat, what virtue in a time-worn coat, and how savory the dinner-table can be made without sirloin steaks and cranberry tarts.

Edmund Morris

#23. In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others.

Edmund Morris

#24. We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.

Edmund Morris

#25. the great fundamental questions looming before us,"21 namely, the unnatural alliance of politics and corporations. It

Edmund Morris

#26. the most dangerous members of the criminal class - the criminals of great wealth.

Edmund Morris

#27. History admires the wise, but elevates the brave.

Edmund Morris

#28. ... I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.

Edmund Morris

#29. Nobody likes him now but the people,

Edmund Morris

#30. Well, we seem to have it.

Edmund Morris

#31. [Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as "a dangerous and ominous jingo," and "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.

Edmund Morris

#32. It has been objected that I am a boy," said Roosevelt wearily - he had been hearing the charge for years - "but I can only offer the time-honored reply, that years will cure me of that." He

Edmund Morris

#33. For once, he could look back at the past without regret, and at the future without bewilderment. Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them.

Edmund Morris

#34. What I cannot understand about the Russian," Roosevelt complained, "is the way he will lie when he knows perfectly well that you know he is lying.

Edmund Morris

#35. the most trenchant commentary was

Edmund Morris

#36. Corporate cunning has developed faster than the laws of nation and state," he remarked to the reporter Lindsay Denison. "Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.

Edmund Morris

#37. Theodore," [Theodore Sr] said, eschewing boyish nicknames, "you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it.

Edmund Morris

#38. Three cheers for Mr. and Mrs. Bower and their really satisfactory American family of twelve children!

Edmund Morris

#39. We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them.

Edmund Morris

#40. The Kaiser was enough of a man to stand a tough, confidential message--and enough of a woman, presumably, to retreat if it could be made to look glamorous.

Edmund Morris

#41. If he was less motivated by compassion than anger at what he saw as the arrogance of capital,he chafed,nonetheless,to regulate it.

Edmund Morris

#42. Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals.

Edmund Morris

#43. I think," Philander Knox teased, "it would be better to keep your action free from any taint of legality.

Edmund Morris

#44. Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world's resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature.

Edmund Morris