Quotes by Theodore Roosevelt
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Alone of human beings the good and wise mother stands on a plane of equal honor with the bravest soldier; for she has gladly gone down to the brink of the chasm of darkness to bring back the children in whose hands rests the future of the years.

Water is a commodity not by any means to be found everywhere...When found, it is more than likely to be bad, being either from a bitter alkaline pool, or from a hole in a creek, so muddy that it can only be called liquid by courtesy.

No educated man can afford to be ignorant of the Bible.

Freemasonry teaches not merely temperance, fortitude, prudence, justice, brotherly love, relief, and truth, but liberty, equality, and fraternity, and it denounces ignorance, superstition, bigotry, lust tyranny and despotism.

Burning fossil fuels is like breaking up the furniture to feed the fireplace because it's easier than going out to the woodpile.

A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.

Life is a great adventure…accept it in such a spirit.

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.

In the great battle of life, no brilliancy of intellect, no perfection of bodily development, will count when weighed in the balance against the assemblage of virtues, active and passive, of moral qualities which we group together under the name of character.

By acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.

Just as you believe you may have already halfway there.

I have had a great time as president.

I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision...I enjoyed the life to the full.

The greatest privilege and greatest duty for any man is to be happily married, and no other form of success or service, for either man or woman, can be wisely accepted as a substitute or alternative.

War is not merely justifiable, but imperative upon honorable men, upon an honorable nation, where peace can only be obtained by the sacrifice of conscientious conviction or of national welfare.

The
highest form of success comes to the man who does not shrink from
danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who, out of these, wins
the splendid ultimate triumph.

Everyone loves justice in the affairs of another.

Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.

From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life's burdens.

The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it. Life is a great adventure, and I want to say to you, accept it in such a spirit.

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.

McKinley shows all the background of a chocolate eclair.

A nation that still needs to distinguish between stealing an election, and stealing a new pair of shoes, is not completely civilized yet.

The ordinary air fighter is an extraordinary man and the extraordinary air fighter stands as one in a million among his fellows.

We face the future with our past and our present as guarantors of our promises; and we are content to stand or to fall by the record which we have made and are making.

The leader works in the open and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.

It may be that at some time in the dim future of the race the need for war will vanish: but that time is yet ages distant. As yet no nation can hold its place in the world, or can do any work really worth doing, unless it stands ready to guard its right with an armed hand.

Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth.

Fertile plains, every foot of them tilled, are of the first necessity; but great natural playgrounds of mountain, forest, cliff-walled lake, and brawling brook are also necessary to the full and many-sided development of a fine race.

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

I believe that there should be a very much heavier progressive tax on very large incomes, a tax which should increase in a very marked fashion for the gigantic incomes.

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.

What I have advocated is not wild radicalism. It is the highest and wisest kind of conservatism.

The great virtue of my radicalism lies in the fact that I am perfectly ready, if necessary, to be radical on the conservative side.

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.

Among the wise and high-minded people who in self-respecting and genuine fashion strive earnestly for peace, there are the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a movement and always discrediting it the men who form the lunatic fringe in all reform movements.

The worst lesson that can be taught to a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings.

Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.

I stand for the square deal. I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.

Show me a man who makes no mistakes, and I will show you a man who doesn't do things.

With self-discipline, all things are possible.

To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that the success can only come to the player who hits the line hard.

The only trouble with the movement for the preservation of our forests is that it has not gone nearly far enough, and was not begun soon enough.

There is a homely old adage which runs: Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far. If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.

'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.

I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding.

Nowadays the field naturalist-who is usually at all points superior to the mere closet naturalist-follows a profession as full of hazard and interest as that of the explorer or of the big-game hunter in the remote wilderness.

The chief factor in any man's success or failure must be his own character.

Courage, hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to successful life.

My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have.

There are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.

Most of us tiptoe through life in order to make it safely to death.

Conservation and rural-life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at the bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily given for the future.

Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits-the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.

Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!

Each man must work for himself, and unless he so works, no outside help can avail him.

It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.

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.

It may be that 'the voice of the people is the voice of God' in fifty one cases out of a hundred, but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, of, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.

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.

Get action. Do things; be sane; don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.

It is a wicked thing to be neutral between right and wrong.

The worst thing I can do is nothing.

There are good men and bad men of all nationalities, creeds and colors; and if this world of ours is ever to become what we hope some day it may become, it must be by the general recognition that the man's heart and soul, the man's worth and actions, determine his standing.

There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality . All else is immorality.

The duties are even more important than the rights; and in the long run I think that the reward is ampler and greater for duty well done, than for the insistence upon individual rights.

I violate no secret when I say that one of the greatest values in Masonry is that it affords an opportunity for men of all walks of life to meet on common ground where all men are equal and have one common interest.

From its origin to the present hour, in all its vicissitudes, Masonry has been the steady unwearing friend of man.

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.

Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction.

The chase is among the best of all national pastimes; it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone.

I want to see you game, boys, I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender.

We will send ships and Marines as soon as possible for the protection of American life and property.

Let men express the intense admiration, which I share with all other Americans, of the record made by the Marines.

Conservation means development as much as it does protection.

There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.

Every book of tactics in the regiment was in use from morning until night, and the officers and non-commissioned officers were always studying the problems presented at the schools.

While my interest in natural history has added very little to my sum of achievement, it has added immeasurably to my sum of enjoyment in life.

The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.

There comes a time in the life of a nation, as in the life of an individual, when it must face great responsibilities, whether it will or no. We have now reached that time. We cannot avoid facing the fact that we occupy a new place among the people of the world.

The little owls call to each other with tremulous, quavering voices throughout the livelong night, as they sit in the creaking trees.

I am rather more apt to read old books than new ones.

I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased; and not impaired in value.

With a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness; for to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.

The Welfare of Each of Us Is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us.

Success, the real success, does not depend upon the position you hold but upon how you carry yourself in that position.

If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office.