“Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.”

-An Autobiography, 1913.

“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.

“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

“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

“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

“It is more difficult to preserve the fruits of victory than to
win the victory.”
-McClure’s Magazine, October 1901

“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

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

“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

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

-Atlantic Monthly, August 1894