Theodore Roosevelt was a very effective writer and speaker, and he is eminently quotable. For each of the quotes below, the Theodore Roosevelt Center has provided a brief explanation of the setting or the context in which TR made the statement.
The TR Quote of the Day App, available in the Mac App Store or Android Market for your iOS and Android devices, also includes a TR Quiz to test your knowledge about our 26th president.
Quote for
May 18, 2012
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The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.
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This passages comes from Roosevelt’s famous “new nationalism” speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, on August 31, 1910. Roosevelt was not an equalitarian, but he wanted the fruits of life to be the reward of merit, not unearned privilege.
Previous Quotes:
05/17/2012
In private most of the beneficiaries of special privilege and not a few other persons, freely defend it; advancing the usual argument, that only a limited number of persons are fit to lead humanity, and that these persons should be permitted to accumulate wealth and power without let or hindrance, because this is really to the benefit of everybody—a position by the way, fundamentally identical with that of the laissez faire school of economists who until recently held unchecked sway in so many institutions of learning.
Roosevelt wrote these words in the Outlook on January 28, 1911. Roosevelt generally did not begrudge the wealthiest Americans their wealth, but he believed that there must be some checks on unlimited accumulation in the hands of the few, and that the state should not serve as the handmaiden and cheerleader for the most privileged classes.
05/16/2012
We must set our faces against privilege; just as much against the kind of privilege which would let the shiftless and lazy laborer take what his brother has earned as against the privilege which allows the huge capitalist to take too to which he is not entitled.
Roosevelt wrote these words in an essay in the Outlook, dated March 27, 1909. He wanted every individual to take his own part, attain true self-reliance, and he disliked the lazy and shiftless as much as he did what he elsewhere called “malefactors of great wealth.”
05/15/2012
Man needs to know the truth about himself—as much of it, that is, as he can grasp—if he is to make the most of himself. It is only by the painstaking collection of the details of old civilizations, by the patient working out of the rude racial and cultural beginnings which led up to the ancient civilizations, and by studying races yet in their childhood, that the modern investigator can comprehend the nature of the remote past from which we of today have sprung, and from which we are separated by a wide gulf of time and change.
Roosevelt wrote these words in 1916, as the introduction to a volume called Harvard African Studies. Although he was a towering intellectual, TR usually confined his writing to subjects of practical application. This is unusually theoretical for Roosevelt.
05/14/2012
I certainly would not be willing to hold the Presidency at the cost of failing to do the things which make the real reason why I care to hold it at all. I had much rather be a real President for three years and a half than a figurehead for seven years and a half.
Roosevelt wrote these words to his favorite British historian George Otto Trevelyan on May 28, 1904, as he was preparing to run for a second term. He regarded himself as an accidental president until he was elected in his own right.
05/13/2012
Life is a long campaign where every victory merely leaves the ground free for another battle, and sooner or later defeat comes to every man, unless death forestalls it. But the final defeat does not and should not cancel the triumphs, if the latter have been substantial and for a cause worth championing.
Roosevelt wrote these words to British historian George Otto Trevelyan on March 9, 1905. Nothing was more characteristic of Roosevelt than to see life as a battle in which there were clear winners and clear losers.
05/12/2012
Each man has got to carry out his own principles in his own way. If he tries to model himself on some one else he will make a poor show of it. My own view has been that if I must choose between taking risks by not doing a thing or by doing it, I will take the risks of doing it.
Roosevelt spoke these words at a banquet in Dallas, Texas, on April 5, 1905. To the extent that he modeled his presidency on that of any of his predecessors, it was that of his hero Abraham Lincoln.
05/11/2012
I was bent upon making the government the most efficient possible instrument in helping the people of the United States to better themselves in every way, politically, socially, and industrially. I believed with all my heart in real and thoroughgoing democracy, and I wished to make this democracy industrial as well as political.
Roosevelt made this assessment of his presidency in his 1913 Autobiography. TR believed in government, and was not afraid to speak unapologetically about its capacity to improve the lives of the American people.
05/10/2012
I believed that the Constitution should be treated as the greatest document ever devised by the wit of man to aid a people in exercising every power necessary for its own betterment, and not a straitjacket cunningly fashioned to strangle growth.
Like Founding Father Alexander Hamilton before him, Roosevelt was a broad constructionist who believed that the U.S. Constitution was an enabling document rather than a restraining document. He wrote this defense of his philosophy of government in his 1913 Autobiography.
05/09/2012
My great usefulness as President came in connection with the Anthracite Coal Strike, the voyage of the battle fleet around the world, the taking of Panama, the handling of Germany in the Venezuela business, England in the Alaska boundary matter, the irrigation business in the West, and finally, I think, the toning up of the Government service generally.
Roosevelt wrote this analysis of his presidency to E.A. Van Valkenburg on September 5, 1916, when he had been out of power for almost a decade. His intervention in the coal strike occurred in 1902. His insistence that Germany not bombard or invade Venezuela laid the groundwork for the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1905.
05/08/2012
Any man who has occupied the office of President realizes the incredible amount of administrative work with which the President has to deal even in time of peace. He is of necessity a very busy man, a much-driven man, from whose mind there can never be absent, for many minutes at a time, the consideration of some problem of importance, or of some matter of less importance which yet causes worry and strain.
By the time he ascended to the presidency, Roosevelt had become an outstanding administrator. Though he preferred action and life in the bully pulpit to administrative paperwork and decision making, he threw himself into the presidency with the same spirit that he used in cattle roundups or in attacking San Juan Hill in Cuba.