Theodore Roosevelt

“If there is not the war, you don't get the great general if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.”

“No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.”

“Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.”

“With self-discipline most anything is possible.”

“People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.”

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.”

“Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.”

“The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”

“For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”

“Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.”

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

“It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.”

“Speak softly and carry a big stick”

“I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.”

“Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.”

“There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.”

“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.”

“The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”

“Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”

“Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.”

“Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.”

“A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.”

“The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.”

“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”