Top 100 T Roosevelt Quotes
#1. 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
#2. If war is the solution, why didn't Roosevelt declare war on poverty?
Preston Sturges
#3. Teddy Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax. If I am sitting pretty and you've got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can't, what's the big deal for me to say, 'I'm going to pay a little bit more'? That is neighborliness.
Barack Obama
#4. Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft!
Theodore Roosevelt
#5. 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
#6. For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.
Sydney Pollack
#7. Miss Volker," I said about as politely as I knew how, "do you think you will outlast the rest of these original people?" "I have to," she said. "I made a promise to Eleanor Roosevelt to see them to their graves, and I can't drop dead on the job - so let's get going.
Jack Gantos
#8. 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
#9. Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. "Do not answer Bryan; attack him!" he counseled in early September, adding, "Don't let him make the issues.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#10. Show me a man who makes no mistakes, and I will show you a man who doesn't do things.
Theodore Roosevelt
#11. In this country kings or dukes don't amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the President; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres.
Billie Holiday
#12. You'll have to learn that public life takes a lot of sweat. But it doesn't need to worry you. You won't always be right, but you musn't suffer from being wrong.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#13. I can't tell you how to succeed, but I can tell you how to fail: Try to please everybody.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#15. 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
#17. Don't limit your challenges - challenge your limits.
Don't spread patriotism too thin.
Theodore Roosevelt
#18. My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they'll say something like, 'Oh, didn't he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?' Well, that's just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos.
Rick Perlstein
#19. Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don't have the strength.
Theodore Roosevelt
#20. Nothing was ever accomplished by anyone who said 'It can't be done.'
Eleanor Roosevelt
#21. He hadn't even come to the Teddy Roosevelt School with Sampson.
James Patterson
#22. Knowing what's right doesn't mean much unless you do what's right.
Theodore Roosevelt
#23. Raven Stone and Don Carson are the stupidest fucking people on the planet because their mothers didn't breastfeed them.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#24. You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#25. Because high school only comes around once, and I would hate to look back and think I didn't make the most of every moment because I was scared of what other people thought. Other people never think that much about you anyway. Eleanor Roosevelt said that.
Sarah Strohmeyer
#26. It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#27. In doing your work in the great world, it is a safe plan to follow a rule I once heard on the football field: Don't flinch, don't fall; hit the line hard.
Theodore Roosevelt
#28. Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can't even lift them.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#30. Such an experiment without actual conditions of war to support it is a foolish waste of time ... I once saw a man kill a lion with a 30-30 caliber rifle under certain conditions, but that doesn't mean that a 30-30 rifle is a lion gun.
Theodore Roosevelt
#31. When you build a memorial, you build it not because the person wanted it, but for the future
for generations who didn't know the man and didn't know the era in which he lived.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#32. When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn't agreeing with you. He's just listening to you.
Gore Vidal
#33. I don't think any President ever enjoyed himself more than I did. Moreover, I don't think any ex-President ever enjoyed himself more.
Theodore Roosevelt
#35. Most of the work that's done in the world gets done by people who weren't feeling all that well at the time that they did it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#37. The CIO put up half a million dollars for Roosevelt's 1936 campaign and provided him with an immense group of active labor workers who played a large part in the sweeping victory he won at the polls.
John T. Flynn
#38. I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won't let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it; I'll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so - I'll beat myself.
Theodore Roosevelt
#39. The president didn't ask me any questions. But I'm glad he didn't, because I was so shocked watching him that I don't think I could have made a sesible reply.' He turned to look Byrnes squarely in the eye. 'We've been talking to a dying man.
Andrei Cherny
#40. This was my first real lesson in politics ... If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, hatchet, and the chisel to make a boat with, why, go and make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't, so with men.
Theodore Roosevelt
#41. I don't know that I will ever make a political speech again." Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. "Yes," Roosevelt laughingly said. "I won't say never.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#42. Courage isn't the absence of fear, it's the choice that something else is greater than that fear.
Theodore Roosevelt
#43. Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say
yes.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#45. I'm always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?
Mel Brooks
#46. And if something came along that didn't sound so good, it perhaps didn't always get out there as it should have. But given the fact that she [Eleanor Roosevelt] had the help, nonetheless she knew how to use it. And she used it very effectively.
William A. Rusher
#47. Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#48. Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.
Rudy Giuliani
#49. A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#50. And in her [Eleanor Roosevelt] letters, she writes the most, you know, fanciful letters: when we are together, and when we are reunited, and you know, I will be your surrogate wife. Of course she doesn't use that word, but I will be the mother to my brothers, and I will be your primary love.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#51. Born in the silent era, with the first ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Roosevelt Hotel, the Oscars are a tradition in a business that doesn't have much of it, and the biggest spectacle in a business that's often nothing but.
Steve Erickson
#52. These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, on my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks ... but Fala does resent them.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#53. I do not think I will ever become deadened, because I live in other people's lives, I must admit there are times when it weighs medown because I can't do some of the things I want.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#54. Do not get into a fight if you can possibly avoid it. If you get in, see it through. Don't hit if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting, but never hit soft. Don't hit at all if you can help it; don't hit a man if you can possibly avoid it; but if you do hit him, put him to sleep.
Theodore Roosevelt
#55. But there isn't going to be any First Lady. There is just to be plain, ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt ... I never wanted to be the president's wife, and don't want it now. You don't quite believe me, do you? Very likely no one would-except possibly some woman who had had the job.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#56. Well, at the time, we certainly regarded them [Elianor and Franklin Roosevelt] as partners. We did not know what has since come out about the difficulties of their marital life, or the problems that Franklin gave Eleanor and his mother gave Eleanor, in many respects. We didn't know much about that.
William A. Rusher
#57. So the blues player, he ain't worried and bothered, but he's got something for the worried people.
Roosevelt Sykes
#58. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care
Theodore Roosevelt
#59. High School students in America debate why President Roosevelt didn't bomb the rail lines to Hitler's camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il's camps, and did nothing.
Blaine Harden
#60. I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman [Mussolini].
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#61. 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
#63. It isn't sufficient just to want - you've got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#64. You can't choose your potential, but you can choose to fulfill it.
Theodore Roosevelt
#65. I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.
Theodore Roosevelt
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. If Roosevelt didn't have World War II, he never would have had a third term.
Robert Dallek
#69. So I took an interest in politics, but I don't know whether I enjoyed it! It was a wife's duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books, or a particular dish for dinner.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#70. You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#71. 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
#72. Meeting smaller emergencies and learning to deal with them had given me the confidence to deal with this larger emergency. So, little by little, I found out how to do things. After each catastrophe you don't worry so much the next time, and each time you emerge stronger from your victory.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#73. You need not be proud of me ... I'm only being active till you can be again
it isn't such a great desire on my part to serve theworld and I'll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily!
Eleanor Roosevelt
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The man who does not think it was America's duty to fight for her own sake in view of the infamous conduct of Germany toward us stands on a level with a man who wouldn't think it necessary to fight in a private quarrel because his wife's face was slapped.
Theodore Roosevelt
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. They do not say Roosevelt saved our system. They say he has given us a new one. That is logical.
John T. Flynn
#82. [Deficits are] a yawner. We, as Republicans, have talked about deficits and balanced budgets since the days of Roosevelt, and the people simply haven't listened, because they can't relate to those huge numbers.
Paul Laxalt
#83. Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.
Russell Baker
#84. Taft was Roosevelt's handpicked successor. I didn't know how deep the friendship was between the two men until I read their almost four hundred letters, stretching back the to early '30s. It made me realize the heartbreak when they ruptured was much more than a political division.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#85. It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worthhearing; but as a rule they don't know anything outside their own business.
Theodore Roosevelt
#87. Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#88. Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, It can't be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#89. If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.
Theodore Roosevelt
#90. What a great man. There aren't very many of them left. I can't wait to see his other policies. Hope he's the next Teddy Roosevelt!
Brad McKinniss
#91. Furnish an example, stop preaching, stop shielding, don't prevent self-reliance and initiative, allow your children to develop along thier own lines.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#92. But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality.
John T. Flynn
#94. But as we shall see, Roosevelt, through a combination of events and influences, fell deeper and deeper into the toils of various revolutionary operators, not because he was interested in revolution but because he was interested in votes.
John T. Flynn
#95. Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.
Tina Brown
#96. I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#97. My father was a Republican, and he couldn't stand what Franklin Delano Roosevelt was doing to the country. I always say I'm a mean-spirited narrow-minded right-wing, conservative Christian ... I start out with that, and if you don't like it, you can lump it. I am not politically correct.
Jane Russell
#98. We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe.
Barack Obama
#99. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.
Theodore Roosevelt
#100. Most people today don't feel that Barack Obama is on our side. We sense he's incapable of doing what Roosevelt did, of loving his country so much that he was willing to run great risks in order to advance its cause, to free others from a new Dark Age - and protect our own liberty in the process.
Arthur L. Herman
