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Quotes

The following is a list of quotations attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. Where a source can be verified, it is noted below along with a brief explanation of the setting or the context for that quote. This list includes a number of quotations for which a source has not been verified in Theodore Roosevelt's writings. The context for many of the quotes included here reflects research that has been conducted throughout the years by curators of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University, which is presented here through a cooperation between Harvard College Library and the Theodore Roosevelt Center. Quotations will be added to this list as staff at both institutions continue their research.

TR speaking with people on rooftop behind him

…I am no longer a candidate and am free from the everlasting suspicion and ill natured judgment which being a candidate entails.

Not long after his inauguration in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt toured and hunted throughout many states. Free from the constraints of campaigning, Roosevelt enjoyed his trip thoroughly, even when he was speaking to crowds.

Quotes

…I am no longer a candidate and am free from the everlasting suspicion and ill natured judgment which being a candidate entails.

…I am out of doors most of the time, chopping, walking, rowing or riding – always with Edith.

…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 grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.

…I congratulate you especially upon the type of manhood and womanhood you developed in the state. This is what counts.

…I do not think that Mrs. Roosevelt could stand another pet in the house at present!

…I see embodied the spirit upon which we have to rely to make our community great – the spirit of hard work, of self-reliant capacity each to shift for himself and yet of power to unite for the common benefit.

…I speak French, I am sorry to say, as if it were a non-Aryan tongue, without tense or gender although with agglutinative vividness and fluency.

…if any friends of ours wish to commemorate us after death the way to do it is by some expression of good deeds to those who are still living.

…if, justly proud of our achievements, we failed to realize that we have plenty of shortcomings to remedy, that there was a terrible problem before us, which we must work out right, under the gravest national penalties if we fail.

…in a strange land a man who cares for wild birds and wild beasts always sees and hears something that is new to him and interests him. In the dense tropical woods near Rio Janeiro I heard in late October–springtime, near the southern tropic–the songs of many birds that I could not identify.

…in addition to courage and honesty we need the saving grace of common sense, for without that a man will make but scant headway in the world.

…it does not make any difference what work the man is doing if he does it well.

…it does not seem to me that it would be honorable for a man who has consistently advocated a warlike policy not to be willing himself to bear the brunt of carrying out that policy.

…it is a dreadful thing to me to see us as a nation mishandling ourselves as we have been doing.

…it is always true that while education is not all, without it we would not amount to much.

…it is by no means easy to combine honesty and efficiency; and yet it is absolutely necessary, in order to do any work really worth doing.