Top 100 Quotes About Roosevelt
#1. President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor.
Gore Vidal
#2. Theodore Roosevelt was a conservative who adopted progressive policies.
Walter Lippmann
#3. Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Eleanor Roosevelt
#4. Roosevelt's strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#6. (Theodore) Roosevelt considered his experience with 'fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier' to be 'the most educational asset' of his entire life, instrumental to his success in becoming president.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#7. I like to see Quentin (Roosevelt) practicing baseball. It gives me hope that one of my boys will not take after his father in this respect, and will prove able to play the national game.
Theodore Roosevelt
#8. They seemed like a team. And I think it is fair to say that Roosevelt was the consummate politician and that Eleanor was the socially conscious activist. It gave them a nice combination of yang and yin, which they took advantage of. And I think it worked very well for them politically.
William A. Rusher
#9. Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. "He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult," Hunt recalled.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#10. Dillinger at one point was the second most popular man in America after President Roosevelt. And he was a national hero for a good reason. He was robbing the very institutions, the banks, which had afflicted the people for four years, and after four years nothing was getting any better.
Michael Mann
#11. There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson - real lows. And it's never come back. It's a trend that, if you're liberal, is really discouraging.
Robert Caro
#12. The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package, Roosevelt sneered.
Candice Millard
#13. Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.
Terry Teachout
#14. You get to know men, not by looking at them, but by having been one of them. - Theodore Roosevelt,
James J. Patterson
#15. The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!
George Bernard Shaw
#16. The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.
H.L. Mencken
#17. You control an unruly dog with a chain ... or a cage. Never underestimate fear" - Heinrich gestured angrily at Roosevelt - "or the men who would capitalize on it to get what they want." "You are such a pessimist. This is America. Nothing like that could ever happen here.
Larry Correia
#18. Good luck belongs to those who know how and are not afraid." John Hay to President Theodore Roosevelt
John Taliaferro
#19. Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.
Michael Ignatieff
#20. After a quarter of a century in politics, Roosevelt observed, he had found that change was realized by men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#21. If you eliminate the names of Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, Jackson and Wilson, both conventions would get out three days earlier.
Will Rogers
#22. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#23. When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.
Joe Biden
#24. British and Free French in the Mediterranean were fighting to retain their colonial empires. Roosevelt said he hoped to
Stephen E. Ambrose
#25. President Bush was once asked which Presidential speech he admired most. He replied that it was the one Teddy Roosevelt had in his pocket that had helped cushion the blow of a would-be assassin's bullet.
Maureen Dowd
#26. One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.
Winston S. Churchill
#27. Teddy Roosevelt is still a hero among environmentalists for his conservationist policies.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#28. The federal government was entirely complicit. When President Roosevelt passed the Social Security Act of 1935, Southern conservatives and their Northern Republican allies forced the New Deal legislation to exclude domestic workers and farmworkers from all of its employment provisions. That shielded
Timothy B. Tyson
#29. My parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left.
Mike Wallace
#30. When President Teddy Roosevelt posed for the cameras astride a massive steam shovel during construction of the Panama Canal in 1906, it was more than a simple photo op. Though the scene was clearly staged, it symbolized a crucial moment in American history.
Alan Huffman
#31. I told them I belong to the same organizations and clubs Mrs. Roosevelt belongs to, but with a few brave exceptions, I was still unable to do films or television for the next seven years.
Lena Horne
#32. I think Franklin Roosevelt was a lousy president. What he did- which is to impose this great nanny state on America- was a great mistake.
Ed Crane
#33. Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret?
[Theodore Roosevelt 1901 relating reports of water torture in the Philippines to lynching in the south]
Theodore Roosevelt
#34. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, Roosevelt said just before he became president.
Timothy Egan
#35. For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you [Charles de Gaulle] and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.
Winston S. Churchill
#36. Roosevelt once said, "Do something every day that scares you." Continue to push yourself to do those things that scare you, darling. Take those risks and see where you land, for they are the very things that make this journey worthwhile.
Lori Nelson Spielman
#37. We can see beyond the present shadows of war in the Middle East to a new world order where the strong work together to deter and stop aggression. This was precisely Franklin Roosevelt's and Winston Churchill's vision for peace for the post-war period.
Dick Gephardt
#38. The hunter, as Theodore Roosevelt defined him, a man who fights for the integrity of both his prey and the land that sustained it, is being too often overwhelmed by men concerned mostly with playing dress up and shooting guns.
Gary Ferguson
#39. Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.
Jeffrey Sachs
#40. Roosevelt declared, arguing that the insistence upon having only the perfect cure often results in securing no betterment whatever.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#41. Roosevelt repeatedly brought his clenched fist down on the palm of his other hand.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#42. Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.
Susan George
#43. The name Roosevelt has this legendary force in our country at this time.
Theodore Roosevelt
#44. Protecting all this land, working with the President to establish all these monuments, to, you know ... I think the President has a land protection record that's second to no one in this century, maybe Teddy Roosevelt.
Bruce Babbitt
#45. Teddy Roosevelt had handpicked Taft as his successor, and when Teddy Roosevelt tells you to do something, you goddamn do it or risk having him punch you in the butt so hard your poop stays inside you forever out of fear of possibly running into Roosevelt.
Daniel O'Brien
#46. Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. - Eleanor Roosevelt STEPPING
Aleatha Romig
#47. I always liked Barbara Howar and admired her spunk. I know that she considered me - and Alice Roosevelt Longworth - an exception to her negative feelings about Washington widows and single women, whom she basically found dispensable.
Katharine Graham
#48. Eleanor Roosevelt doesn't ever do anything that is going to hurt her husband. She tries things out on him. She gets permission to do things. The amazing thing, I think, historically, is that he says, "Go do it. If you can make this happen, I'll follow you."
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#49. Eleanor Roosevelt started off almost every early article she wrote, starting with, "My mother was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen." And I think her life was a constant and continual and lifelong contrast with her mother.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#50. If Roosevelt didn't have World War II, he never would have had a third term.
Robert Dallek
#51. Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
P. J. O'Rourke
#52. Oh, yes," I said. "My favorite was one I picked up from a Yank. Man named Williamson, from New York, I believe. He said it every time I changed his dressing." "What was it?" " 'Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,' " I said, and dropped the sugar
Diana Gabaldon
#53. As Roosevelt took his place in the open carriage leading the procession, an additional surprise lay in store for him: 150 members of his Rough Rider unit, whom he had led so brilliantly in the Spanish-American War, appeared on horseback to serve as his escort of honor.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#54. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, others, knew how to lead. They knew how to ask the American people for the right things.
John F. Kerry
#55. I am a huge admirer of Franklin Roosevelt's, and I believe social security has done untold good in alleviating the once-widespread issue of poverty among the elderly. FDR believed in the greatness and generosity of Americans - but he was also a cold-blooded politician.
Jon Meacham
#56. Worst damnfool mistake I ever made was letting myself be elected Vice-President of the United States. Should have stuck?as Speaker of the House? Gave up the second most important job in Government foreight long years as Roosevelt's spare tire.
John Nance Garner
#57. Occasionally I'll be sitting somewhere and I'll be listening to someone perhaps not saying the kindest things about me. And I'll look down at my hand and I'll sort of pinch my skin to make sure it still has the requisite thickness I know Eleanor Roosevelt expects me to have.
Hillary Clinton
#58. It may be that the voice of the people is the voice of God 51 times out of 100. But the remaining 49 times, it is the voice of the devil, or worse, the voice of a fool. Theodore Roosevelt
H.W. Brands
#59. Ours is not the creed of the weakling and the coward; ours is the gospel of hope and triumphant endeavor." Theodore Roosevelt
Ryan Stallings
#61. Teddy Roosevelt spoke softly and carried a big stick; Donald Trump speaks loudly and carries a big shtick.
Michael R. Burch
#62. To hear, in the short space of one week, a Scottish terrier booed by an audience and President Roosevelt criticized by Charles Lindbergh was a great strain on our nerves. The props of life seem to be crumbling fast.
E.B. White
#63. She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them.
Amy Bloom
#64. Whenever Roosevelt (Theodore) expected a visitor, he sat up late the night before, reading up on the subject in which he knew his guest was particularly interested. For Roosevelt knew, all the leaders royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.
Dale Carnegie
#65. Previous presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don't think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon.
Joe Klein
#66. a mantra she attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: women in politics, she said, "need to develop skin as tough as a rhinoceros hide.
Mark Leibovich
#67. Franklin Roosevelt had to govern at a time of crisis. If you're going to make changes in the way a nation thinks, you have to have the ability to take the crisis of the moment and use it to shape an agenda.
Pete Du Pont
#68. We were environmentalists of the Teddy Roosevelt theory. We believed in separation of church and state. We believed in the independence of the Supreme Court not being subject to politicians.
Pete McCloskey
#69. Americans have not had a presidential choice since 1932. Roosevelt was our man; every president since Roosevelt has been our man.
Harold Wallace Rosenthal
#70. Franklin Roosevelt was very concerned about environmental issues.
Gaylord Nelson
#71. Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.
Margaret MacMillan
#72. I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice Roosevelt. (His 19-year-old daughter.) I cannot possibly do both.
Theodore Roosevelt
#73. No woman has ever so comforted the distressed or distressed the comfortable. on Eleanor Roosevelt.
Clare Boothe Luce
#74. Afterward, I remember, General Roosevelt said to me, Now, you see, if you think you can, or somebody who believes in you thinks you can, why, then you can!
Norman Vincent Peale
#75. As we go from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Mitt Romney, I now understand why the Republicans don't believe in evolution.
Andy Borowitz
#76. If the problems created by the industrial age were left unattended, Roosevelt cautioned, America would eventually be "sundered by those dreadful lines of division" that set "the haves" and the "have-nots" against one another.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#77. [Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as "a dangerous and ominous jingo," and "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.
Edmund Morris
#78. We shouldn't let the Republicans off the hook. Theodore Roosevelt, we learned from Jeff Cowan's new book, was just as bad as certainly [Louis] Brandeis was, or many Democrats were on the question of segregation.
Jeffrey Rosen
#79. George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
John Lewis Gaddis
#80. 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
#81. why were the State Department and President Roosevelt so hesitant to express in frank terms how they really felt about Hitler at a time when such expressions clearly could have had a powerful effect on his prestige in the world?
Erik Larson
#82. We must uphold the promise of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton and never allow the President and his Republican friends to threaten Social Security by putting it on the Wall Street trading block.
John F. Kerry
#83. By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.
Gore Vidal
#84. I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words. I'm afraid it's too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in naval history in his spare time while in law school
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#85. That's two Appaloosas, two quarter horses and one mule, plus tack. They were ordered by a man called himself Theodore Roosevelt. No chance that would be the president, is there?
Hunter Shea
#86. I agree with President Roosevelt, and generations since, that American seniors deserve better than poverty.
Hank Johnson
#87. They do not say Roosevelt saved our system. They say he has given us a new one. That is logical.
John T. Flynn
#88. This was supposedly an Honors American History class, for seniors only. What deep, dark secrets of American History needed to be kept from younger minds? Were they going to talk about Washington's VD? Lincoln's warts? Roosevelt's hemorrhoids?
Melodie Starkey
#89. Politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. Women really need to emerge as a power to be the countervailing power to the men. And Eleanor Roosevelt's really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#90. When he thought about how he wanted to build his career coming out of college, Hahn took inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt's famous dictum, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."5
Reid Hoffman
#91. According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#92. Teddy Roosevelt ... once said, 'Speak softly and carry a big stick.' Jimmy Carter wants to speak loudly and carry a fly swatter.
Gerald R. Ford
#93. Never will I sit motionless while directly or indirectly apology is made for the murder of the helpless. In securing any kind ofpeace, the first essential is to guarantee to every man the most elementary of rights: the right to his own life. Murder is not debatable.
-Theodore Roosevelt
R.C. Sproul
#94. Along with food, Roosevelt considered the finer points of bullets, colored glasses, Zeiss lenses, iron pans, enameled tableware, cameras, and "flashlights."32 When considering
Michael R. Canfield
#95. Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public condemnation. He told reporters he could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in twentieth century civilization.
Erik Larson
#96. The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great.
Amity Shlaes
#97. Roosevelt was as much concerned to end the oppression of Jews as Lincoln was to end slavery during the Civil War; their priority in policy (whatever their personal compassion for victims of persecution) was not minority rights, but national power.
Howard Zinn
#98. She [Eleanor Roosevelt]wants a life of her own. Her grandmother could have been a painter. Her grandmother could have done so much more than she did with her life. And Eleanor Roosevelt decides she is going to do everything possible with her life. She's going to live a full life.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#99. If war is the solution, why didn't Roosevelt declare war on poverty?
Preston Sturges
#100. We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face ... we must do that which we think we cannot. - Eleanor Roosevelt
Aleatha Romig
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