• “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

    January 3, 2012

  • “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

    December 27, 2011

  • “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

    December 20, 2011

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

    September 14, 1881
    Letter to Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.

    December 13, 2011

  • “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

    December 6, 2011

  • “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

    November 29, 2011

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

    Chicago, Illinois
    April 10, 1899

    November 22, 2011

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

    Atlantic Monthly
    August 1894

    November 15, 2011

  • “There is no class of our citizens, big or small, who so emphatically deserve well of the country as the officers and the enlisted men of the army and navy.”

    New York Times
    November 22, 1914

    November 8, 2011

  • “It is impossible for a democracy to endure if the political lines are drawn to coincide with class lines.”

    Century
    January 1900

     

    November 1, 2011

  • “I think we can say this much, Republicans have not always done well, but it will be an evil day when they do as badly as the Democrats.”

    New York
    October 28, 1882

    October 18, 2011

  • “It often happens that the good conditions of the past can be regained, not by going back, but by going forward. We cannot recreate what is dead; we cannot stop the march of events; but we can direct this march, and out of the new conditions
    develop something better than the past knew.”

    The Outlook
    August 27, 1910

    October 11, 2011