Quotes By Theodore Roosevelt

When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

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

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.

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

The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

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.

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.

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.

The boy who is going to make a great man must not make up his mind merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats.

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer "Present" or "Not guilty."

Believe you can and you're halfway there.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.

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

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

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

The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.

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

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.