“Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.”

– Washington, DC, April 14, 1906

“I believe the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men.”

– Columbus, OH, February 21, 1912

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“What a place the Presidency is for learning to keep one’s temper.”

– Letter to his son Kermit, June 17, 1906

“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

“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

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

– The Outlook, March 31, 1900

“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