“It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the
greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.”

– Berkeley, California, 1911

“There is one quality which perhaps, strictly speaking, is as much intellectual as moral, but which is too often wholly lacking in
men of high intellectual ability and without which real
character cannot exist—namely, the fundamental
gift of common sense.”

– The Outlook, November 8, 1913

“No laws which the wit of man can devise will avail to make the community prosperous if the average individual lives in such fashion that his expenditures always exceed his income.”

– The Outlook, October 5, 1912

“Unless this is in very truth a government of, by, and for the people, then both historically and in world interest our national existence loses most of its point.”

– The Outlook, January 21, 1911

“We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours
if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we
trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.”

– at Carnegie Hall, March 20, 1912

“At Sagamore Hill we love a great many things—birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and
children and hard work and the joy of life.”

– An Autobiography, 1913

“Christmas was an occasion of literally delirious joy… I never knew anyone else have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce them
exactly for my own children.”

– An Autobiography, 1913

“I don’t think partisanship should ever obscure the truth.”

– September 14, 1881 letter to
Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.

“It is not in the power of any human being to devise legislation or administration by which every man shall achieve success and have happiness; it not only is not in the power of any man to do that,
but if any man says that he can do it, distrust him as a quack.”

– Dallas, Texas, April 5, 1905

“There are two kinds of historians: one, the delver, the bricklayer, the man who laboriously gathers together bare facts; and the other, the builder, the architect, who out of these facts makes the great edifice of history. Both are indispensable; but it is only the latter who can be called an historian in the highest sense.”

– Bookman, June 1897

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”

– Chicago, Illinois, April 10, 1899

“[O]nly a very few great reforms or great measures of any kind can be carried through without concession.”

– Atlantic Monthly, August 1894