“A great free people owes it to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil.”

– Fourth Annual Message to Congress, 1904

“Where such results flow from battles as flowed from Bannockburn and Yorktown, centuries must pass before the wound not only scars over but becomes completely forgotten, and the memory becomes a bond of union and not a cause of division. It is our business to shorten the time as much as possible.”

– Letter to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, January 1, 1908

“Something can be done by good laws; more can be done by the honest administration of the laws; but most of all can be done by frowning resolutely upon the preachers of vague discontent…”

– Review of Reviews, January 1897

“If there is any one quality that is not admirable, whether in a
nation or in an individual, it is hysterics, either in
religion or in anything else.”

– Boston, MA, August 25, 1902

“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