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 19, 2013
:
"
I sleep, eat and work as I never could do in ten years’ time in the city.
"
Roosevelt wrote these words in a letter to his first wife Alice Lee Roosevelt while he was on his first hunting trip in Dakota Territory in September 1883. He was feeling in excellent health and was quite invigorated by the fresh air and exercise he enjoyed while on the hunt.
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Previous Quotes:
05/18/2013
I shall pray for you every night; good bye my doubly dear wife.
Roosevelt closed a letter to his first wife Alice Lee Roosevelt with these words in September 1883. Alice was expecting the couple’s first child.
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of Origin
05/17/2013
It is a very desolate place, high barren hills, scantily clad with grass, and here and there, in sheltered places a few stunted cottonwood trees.
In a letter dated September 8, 1883, Theodore Roosevelt describes the landscape of the badlands to his first wife Alice Lee Roosevelt. It was Roosevelt’s first visit to Dakota Territory.
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05/16/2013
We camped by an excellent spring of cold, clear water - not a common luxury in the Bad Lands.
This brief statement emphasizes the lack of water in the badlands of North Dakota and was included in Theodore Roosevelt's magazine article entitled, "The Ranchman's Rifle on Crag and Prairie."
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of Origin
05/15/2013
Last evening, when the moon rose, from the ranch veranda we could see the river-bed almost dry, the stream having shrunk under the drought till it was little but a string of shallow pools, with between them a trickle of water that was not ankle deep…”
Roosevelt wrote these words describing the nearly-dry Little Missouri River that ran through his Elkhorn Ranch in the badlands of Dakota Territory. This excerpt is from a magazine article TR wrote in 1888 entitled, “Sheriff’s Work on a Ranch.”
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of Origin
05/14/2013
Mother is too pretty and cunning for anything.
Theodore Roosevelt possessed a high regard for his wife, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, throughout their years of marriage. He used this statement to describe her while on a speaking trip through the west in the spring of 1911.
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of Origin
05/13/2013
If, on the other hand, he does not work practically, with the knowledge that he is in the world of actual men and must get results, he becomes a worthless head-in-the-air creature, a nuisance to himself and to everybody else.
Theodore Roosevelt was not only a man of ideals. He was very conscious of the need for practicality as he describes in a letter to his son Kermit dated January 27, 1915.
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of Origin
05/12/2013
If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful.
Theodore Roosevelt was a man of ideals, although he always strove to balance those ideals with practicality, as he explained in a letter to his son Kermit dated January 27, 1915.
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of Origin
05/11/2013
In this life, no matter how much energy and ability and foresight we show, we are often certain to be trampled upon by men and events.
Theodore Roosevelt shared this insight with his son Kermit in a letter dated March 15, 1908. He was disappointed with his son, Ted, and worried that Ted had not learned this fact of life.
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of Origin
05/10/2013
It has been emphatically a man’s work, worth doing from every aspect.
TR refers to the grueling work of reforming the New York Police Department in a letter to his sister Bye (Anna Cowles Roosevelt), dated February 25, 1896. He had been Police Commissioner for ten months, and faced continued opposition from the press, the public and the politicians.
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05/09/2013
I am having great difficulty in getting down the fences in the public domain, because as always happens in such a case, I find the problem very complicated instead of very simple.
TR wrote these words to his friend, Hamlin Garland, about the complex issues surrounding removal of fences from public lands, particularly in the west. In 1885, federal legislation was passed outlawing the enclosure of public lands, but many such fences were already in place, built by struggling ranchers and large corporations alike.
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of Origin