“Americanism means many things. It means equality of rights and, therefore, equality of duty and obligation.”

Letter to S. Stanwood Menken
January 10, 1917

“We all of us feel, most rightly and properly, that we belong to the greatest nation that has ever existed on the earth.”

July 4, 1886
Dickinson, Dakota Territory

“May all good fortune attend you and yours throughout the year that is opening.”

Letter to Jacob Riis
January 8, 1902

“Christmas was an occasion of literally delirious joy.”

An Autobiography
1913

“The good citizen is the man who does what can be done as well as it possibly can be done.”

Westfield, Massachusetts
September 2, 1902

“More and more we are learning that to love one’s country above all others is in no way incompatible with respecting and wishing well to all others.”

Buffalo, New York
May 20, 1901

“We must always weigh well our duties in such a case, and consider the rights of others as well as our own rights, in the interest of the world at large.“

Outlook
September 23, 1914

“The things of the body are good; the things of the intellect better; the best of all are the things of the soul; for, in the nation as in the individual, in the long run it is character that counts.”

Thanksgiving Proclamation
October 31, 1908

“…justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong.“

Second Inaugural Address
March 4, 1905

“I feel that in a peculiar degree New York is not representative of the country.“

Letter to Anna Roosevelt Cowles
October 16, 1902

“Under no form of government is it so necessary thus to combine efficiency and morality, high principle and rough common sense, justice and the sturdiest physical and moral courage, as in a republic.”

Inaugural address as the Governor of New York
January 2, 1899