Top 100 Roosevelt Theodore Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Avoid the base hypocrisy of condemning in one man what you pass over in silence when committed by another.
Theodore Roosevelt
#3. Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood - the virtues that made America.
Theodore Roosevelt
#4. Under government ownership corruption can flourish just as rankly as under private ownership.
Theodore Roosevelt
#5. Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those shown themselves worthy of it.
Theodore Roosevelt
#6. All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American.
Theodore Roosevelt
#8. Personally I have never been able to understand why the head of a big business, whether it be the Nation, the State or the Army, or Navy should not desire to have very strong and positive people under him.
Theodore Roosevelt
#9. I highly venerate the Masonic Institution, under the fullest persuasion that, when its principles are acknowledged and its laws and precepts obeyed, it comes nearest to the Christian religion, in its moral effects and influence, of any institution with which I am acquainted.
Theodore Roosevelt
#10. The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided, but NEVER hit softly.
Theodore Roosevelt
#11. To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.
Theodore Roosevelt
#12. Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny.
Theodore Roosevelt
#13. It either is or ought to be evident to everyone that business has to prosper before anyone can get any benefit from it.
Theodore Roosevelt
#14. Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft!
Theodore Roosevelt
#15. The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before.
Theodore Roosevelt
#16. Nothing should be permitted to stand in the way of the preservation of the forests, and it is criminal to permit individuals to purchase a little gain for themselves through the destruction of forests when this destruction is fatal to the well-being of the whole country in the future.
Theodore Roosevelt
#17. Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.
Theodore Roosevelt
#18. Every child has inside him an aching void for excitement and if we don't fill it with something which is exciting and interesting and good for him, he will fill it with something which is exciting and interesting and which isn't good for him.
Theodore Roosevelt
#19. The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack.
Theodore Roosevelt
#20. If elected, I shall see to it that every man has a square deal, no less and no more.
Theodore Roosevelt
#21. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.
Theodore Roosevelt
#22. From the very beginning our people have markedly combined practical capacity for affairs with power of devotion to an ideal. The lack of either quality would have rendered the other of small value.
Theodore Roosevelt
#23. The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.
Theodore Roosevelt
#24. No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.
Theodore Roosevelt
#25. 'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.
Theodore Roosevelt
#27. The wildlife and its habitat cannot speak, so we must and we will.
Theodore Roosevelt
#28. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.
Theodore Roosevelt
#29. In advocating any measure we must consider not only its justice but its practicability.
Theodore Roosevelt
#30. A nation that still needs to distinguish between stealing an election, and stealing a new pair of shoes, is not completely civilized yet.
Theodore Roosevelt
#31. Short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things ...
Theodore Roosevelt
#32. Let us show, not merely in great crises, but in every day of life, qualities of practical intelligence, of hardihood and endurance, and above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal.
Theodore Roosevelt
#33. When liberty becomes license, some form of one-man power is not far distant.
Theodore Roosevelt
#34. More and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary the nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures.
Theodore Roosevelt
#35. We want the active and zealous help of every man far-sighted enough to realize the importance from the standpoint of the nation's welfare in the future of preserving the forests.
Theodore Roosevelt
#38. It is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty, and intelligence.
Theodore Roosevelt
#39. For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda.
Ron Fournier
#40. This isn't just about today, this about generations to come. And you've got a chance to be the greatest conservation President since Theodore Roosevelt, and I think he's done it.
Bruce Babbitt
#41. Perhaps there is no more important component of character than steadfast resolution.
Theodore Roosevelt
#42. Mother went off for three days to New York and Mame and Quentin took instant advantage of her absence to fall sick. Quentin's sickness was surely due to a riot in candy and ice-cream with chocolate sauce.
Theodore Roosevelt
#44. What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice. - THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Ryan Holiday
#45. Far-seeing patriots should turn scornfully from men who seek power on a platform which with exquisite nicety combines silly inability to understand the national needs and dishonest insintcerity in promising conflicting and impossible remedies.
Theodore Roosevelt
#46. A President has a great chance; his position is almost that of a king and a prime minister rolled into one. Once he has left office he cannot do very much; and he is a fool if he fails to realize it all and to be profoundly thankful for having had the great chance.
Theodore Roosevelt
#47. Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint after-glow of the red sunset filled the west.
Theodore Roosevelt
#48. It is better for the Government to help a poor man to make a living for his family than to help a rich man make more profit for his company.
Theodore Roosevelt
#49. We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.
Theodore Roosevelt
#50. I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope - the door of opportunity - is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.
Theodore Roosevelt
#51. 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
#52. Thanks to Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, we are now living under a system where the president is forced to step in to stop a regulatory agency from promulgating regulations that Congress refused to enact.
Andrew P. Napolitano
#53. A grove of giant redwood or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral.
Theodore Roosevelt
#54. Father is strength at home, strength in government and strength overseas. Mother represents upbringing, education, the spread of civilization. Children are the lower classes, the lower races, to be brought to maturity and then set free
Theodore Roosevelt
#55. Abraham Lincoln - the spirit incarnate of those who won victory in the Civil War - was the true representative of this people, not only for his own generation, but for all time, because he was a man among men.
Theodore Roosevelt
#56. Show me a man who makes no mistakes, and I will show you a man who doesn't do things.
Theodore Roosevelt
#57. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt has been described as founder of the Bull Moose Party, the man who led his troops up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, a big game hunter, family man, civic servant and a host of other things.
Zig Ziglar
#59. In life, as in football, the principle to follow is to hit the line hard.
Theodore Roosevelt
#60. To play the demagogue for purposes of self-interest is a cardinal sin against the people in a democracy, exactly as to play the courtier for such purposes is a cardinal sin against the people under other forms of government.
Theodore Roosevelt
#61. Every person who invests in well-selected real estate in a growing section of a prosperous community adopts the surest and safest method of becoming independent, for real estate is the basis of wealth.
Theodore Roosevelt
#63. Unrestrained greed means the ruin of the great woods and the drying up of the sources of the rivers.
Theodore Roosevelt
#64. When we control business in the public interest we are also bound to encourage it in the public interest or it will be a bad thing for everybody and worst of all for those on whose behalf the control is nominally exercised.
Theodore Roosevelt
#66. The wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man (or any person) on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he is worthy to have.
Theodore Roosevelt
#67. I have already lived and enjoyed as much life as any nine other men I have known.
Theodore Roosevelt
#68. We must abandon definitely the laissez-faire theory of political economy, and fearlessly champion a system of increased Governmental control, paying no heed to the cries of the worthy people who denounce this as Socialistic.
Theodore Roosevelt
#70. Make preparations in advance ... you never have trouble if you are prepared for it.
Theodore Roosevelt
#71. No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.
Theodore Roosevelt
#72. Conservation of our resources is the fundamental question before this nation, and that our first and greatest task is to set our house in order and begin to live within our means.
Theodore Roosevelt
#73. But the joy of life is a very good thing, and while work is the essential in it, play also has its place.
Theodore Roosevelt
#74. 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
#77. There has never yet been a person in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.
Theodore Roosevelt
#78. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt
#79. It is time for us now as a nation to exercise the same reasonable foresight in dealing with our great natural resources that would be shown by any prudent man in conserving and widely using the property which contains the assurance of well-being for himself and his children.
Theodore Roosevelt
#80. Where a trust becomes a monopoly the state has an immediate right to interfere.
Theodore Roosevelt
#81. I believe in corporations. They are indispensable instruments of our modern civilization. But I believe they should be so regulated that they shall act for the interests of the community as a whole.
Theodore Roosevelt
#82. A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.
Theodore Roosevelt
#83. In a moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
Theodore Roosevelt
#84. Nowhere, not at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains ...
Theodore Roosevelt
#85. We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right and not because we are afraid.
Theodore Roosevelt
#86. The dreams of golden glory in the future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty deeds we make them come true.
Theodore Roosevelt
#87. If given the choice between Righteousness and Peace, I choose Righteousness.
Theodore Roosevelt
#89. Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth.
Theodore Roosevelt
#90. 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.
Theodore Roosevelt
#91. A good shot must necessarily be a good man since the essence of good marksmanship is self-control and self-control is the essential quality of a good man.
Theodore Roosevelt
#92. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground.
Theodore Roosevelt
#93. The public must retain control of the great waterways. It is essential that any permit to obstruct them for reasons and on conditions that seem good at the moment should be subject to revision when changed conditions demand.
Theodore Roosevelt
#95. A good Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guaranty of peace.
Theodore Roosevelt
#96. The government is us; WE are the government, you and I.- Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
#97. The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.
Theodore Roosevelt
#98. One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always a danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fiber. The
Theodore Roosevelt
#99. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.
Theodore Roosevelt
#100. Malefactors of great wealth have arrogantly ignored the public welfare.
Theodore Roosevelt
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
