Quotes By Theodore Roosevelt

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

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.

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.

When you play, play hard; when you work, don't play at all.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Believe you can and you're halfway there.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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