Weekly wisdom from the Godfather of The Ripon Society and our Nation's 26th President
Theodore Roosevelt

July 27, 2010

"Expose crime and hunt down the criminal; but remember that, even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to
the public mind than the crime itself."


- Washington, DC, April 4, 1906

July 20, 2010

"Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted
only to rhetoric.  If we are really to be a great Nation,
we must not merely talk big; we must act big."


- Metropolitan, September, 1917

July 13, 2010

"Now and then one can stand uncompromisingly for a naked principle and force people up to it. This is always the attractive course; but in certain great crises it may be the wrong course."

- Atlantic Monthly, August, 1894

July 6, 2010

"Like all Americans, I like big things: big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steam boats, and everything else."

- Dickinson, Dakota Territory, July 4, 1886

June 29, 2010

"Nothing has been so strongly borne in on me concerning lawyers on the bench as that the nominal politics of the man has nothing to do with his actions on the bench. His real politics are all important."

- Letter to Henry Cabot Lodge, September 4, 1906

June 22, 2010

"What a place the Presidency is for learning to keep one's temper."

- Letter to his son Kermit, June 17, 1906

June 15, 2010

"There is a tendency to believe that a hundred small men can furnish leadership equal to that of one big man.  This is not so."

- Ladies' Homes Journal, May 1917

June 8, 2010

"No man ever really learned from books how to manage a governmental system....If he has never done anything but study books he will not be a statesman at all."

- Atlantic Monthly, August 1890

June 1, 2010

"Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above is character."

- The Outlook, March 31, 1900

May 25, 2010

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

- Dickinson, Dakota Territory, July 4, 1886

May 18, 2010

"It is a dredful misfortune for a man to grow to feel that his whole livelihood and whole happiness depend upon his staying in office."

-San Francisco, California, May 14, 1903

May 11, 2010

 "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 rest the future of the years."

- The Great Adventure, 1918

May 4, 2010

"Probably the best test of the true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country."

- Sorbonne, Paris, France, April 23, 1910

April 27, 2010

"I have mighty little use for ethics that are applied with such inefficiency that no good results come."

- Harvard University, December 14, 1910

April 20, 2010

"There is a certain tendency among excellent people to believe that everything can be accomplished by law; that when there is any wrong, it is due to what they call the state of society, and that there is immediate need for radical and sweeping changes in the social system."

- Kansas City, Missouri, May 1, 1903

April 13, 2010

"Diplomacy is utterly useless where there is no force behind it; the diplomat is the servant, not the master, of the soldier."

- Newport, Rhode Island, June 2, 1897

April 6, 2010

"I like to see Quentin practicing baseball. It gives me hope that one of my boys will not take after his father in this respect, and will prove able to play the national game."

- Source
1, 2.

March 30, 2010

"A man whose business is sedentary should get some kind of exercise if he wishes to keep himself in as good physical trim as his brethren who do manual labor."

- An Autobiography, 1913.

March 23, 2010

"War with evil; but show no spirit of malignity toward the man who may be responsible for the evil. Put it out of his power to do wrong."

-
Oyster Bay, New York - July 4, 1906.

March 16, 2010

"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility."

- Abilene, Kansas, May 2, 1903.

March 9, 2010

"Whenever there is tyranny by the majority I shall certainly fight it."

- St. Louis, Missouri, March 28, 1912.

March 2, 2010

"More and more I have grown to have a horror of the reformer who is half charlatan and half fanatic, and ruins his own cause by overstatement."

-Oyster Bay, New York - July 20, 1901.

February 23, 2010

"Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience."

-An Autobiography, 1913.

February 16, 2010

"Lincoln is my hero. He was a man of the people who always felt with and for the people, but who had not the slightest touch of the demagogue in him."

-Letter to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, March 9, 1905.

February 9, 2010

"There are few moments more pleasant than the home-coming, when, in the gathering darkness, after crossing the last chain of ice-covered buttes, or after coming round the last turn in the wind-swept valley, we see, through the leafless trees, or across the frozen river, the red gleam of the firelight as it shines through the ranch windows and flickers over the trunks of the cottonwoods outside, warming a man's blood by the mere hint of the warmth awaiting him within."

-Ranch Life in the Hunting Trail, 1896

February 2, 2010

"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.' "
-Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, New York, October 1897

January 26, 2010

"The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is once kindled, it burns like a consuming flame."
-First annual address to Congress, December 3, 1901

January 20, 2010

"It is more difficult to preserve the fruits of victory than to
 win the victory."

-McClure's Magazine, October 1901

January 12, 2010

"No man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character."
-An Autobiography, 1913

January 5, 2010

"To play the demagogue for purposes of self-interest is a cardinal sin against the people in a democracy."
-An Autobiography, 1913

December 22, 2009

"I wonder whether there ever can come in life a thrill of greater exaltation and rapture than that which comes to one between the ages of say six and fourteen, when the library door is thrown open and you walk in to see all the gifts, like a materialized fairyland, arrayed on your special table?"

-Letter to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, December 26, 1903

December 15, 2009

"No student of American history needs to be reminded that the Constitution itself is a bundle of compromises."

-Atlantic Monthly, August 1894

December 8, 2009

"If the business world loses its head, it loses what
legislation cannot supply."


-December 3, 1901, First Annual Message to Congress

December 1, 2009

"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."

-January 24, 1918 National Press Club, Washington, DC.

November 24, 2009

"I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of today unless he has some knowledge of -- a little more than a slight knowledge, some feeling for and of -- the history of the world
 of the past."

-Source

 
       
 

| font color="#000000"> -Source

         
 

| | Contact | Membership | News | Issues | Links | Home |
Paid for by The Ripon Society :: 202.216.1008 :: Privacy Policy
1300 L Street, NW, Suite 900 :: Washington, DC  20005 ::
info@riponsociety.org