“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

“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

“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