An Autobiography quotes

Naturally, there are chapters of my autobiography which cannot now be written.

It seems to me that, for the nation as for the individual, what is most important is to insist on the vital need of combining certain sets of qualities, which separately are common enough, and, alas, useless enough.

… windy street unless back of them lie the strong and tender virtues of a family life based on the love of the one man for the one woman and on their joyous and fearless acceptance of their common obligation to the children that are theirs.

There must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight in the many-sided beauty of life.

With soul of flame and temper of steel we must act as our coolest judgment bids us. We must exercise the largest charity towards the wrongdoer that is compatible with relentless war against the wrongdoing.

There must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight in the many-sided beauty of life.

With soul of flame and temper of steel we must act as our coolest judgment bids us.

We must exercise the largest charity towards the wrongdoer that is compatible with relentless war against the wrongdoing.

With gentleness and tenderness there must go dauntless bravery and grim acceptance of labor and hardship and peril.

All for each, and each for all, is a good motto; but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain himself as not to be a burden to others.

We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty;

Practical efficiency is common, and lofty idealism not uncommon; it is the combination which is necessary, and the combination is rare.

Love of peace is common among weak, shortsighted, timid, and lazy persons; and on the other hand courage is found among many men of evil temper and bad character.

Neither quality shall by itself avail. Justice among the nations of mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be brought about only by those strong and daring men who with wisdom love peace, but who love righteousness more than peace.

Thanksgiving was an appreciated festival, but it in no way came up to Christmas.

Christmas was an occasion of literally delirious joy.

In the evening we hung up our stockings—or rather the biggest stockings we could borrow from the grownups—and before dawn we trooped in to open them while sitting on father’s and mother’s bed;

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.

My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew.

He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.

My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew.

He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness.

He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older he made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls;

Morning prayers were with my father. We used to stand at the foot of the stairs, and when father came down we called out,

“I speak for you and the cubbyhole too!”

There were three of us young children, and we used to sit with father on the sofa while he conducted morning prayers. The place between father and the arm of the sofa we called the “cubbyhole.”

I spoke of this to my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles, which literally opened an entirely new world to me.

I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.

I had been a clumsy and awkward little boy, and while much of my clumsiness and awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of it was due to the fact that I could not see and yet was wholly ignorant that I …

My failure to do so may have been partly due to my taking no interest in the subjects. Before I left Harvard I was already writing one or two chapters of a book I afterwards published on the Naval War of 1812.

Those chapters were so dry that they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.

Still, they represented purpose and serious interest on my part, not the perfunctory effort to do well enough to get a certain mark; and corrections of them by a skilled older man would have impressed me and have commanded my respectful attention.

Years later I read an account of a little man who once in a fifth-rate handicap race won a worthless pewter medal and joyed in it ever after.

Well, as soon as I read that story I felt that that little man and I were brothers.

This was, as far as I remember, the only one of my exceedingly rare athletic triumphs which would be worth relating.

Another bull elephant, also unwounded, which charged, nearly got me, as I had just fired both cartridges from my heavy double-barreled rifle in killing the bull I was after—the first wild elephant I had ever seen.

The second bull came through the thick brush to my left like a steam plow through a light snowdrift, everything snapping before his rush, and was so near that he could have hit me with his trunk.

I slipped past him behind a tree. People have asked me how I felt on this occasion. My answer has always been that I suppose I felt as most men of like experience feel on such occasions.

I slipped past him behind a tree. People have asked me how I felt on this occasion. My answer has always been that I suppose I felt as most men of like experience feel on such occasions.

At such a moment a hunter is so very busy that he has no time to get frightened.

He wants to get in his cartridges and try another shot.

I am by no means sure that it had fixedly hostile intentions, and indeed with my present experience I think it likely that if I had not fired it would have flinched at the last moment and either retreated or gone by me.

But I am not a rhinoceros mind reader, and its actions were such as to warrant my regarding it as a suspicious character.

I stopped it with a couple of bullets, and then followed it up and killed it. The skins of all these animals which I thus killed are in the National Museum at Washington.

But I rarely took exercise merely as exercise. Primarily I took it because I liked it.

Play should never be allowed to interfere with work; and a life devoted merely to play is, of all forms of existence, the most dismal.

But the joy of life is a very good thing, and while work is the essential in it, play also has its place.

Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all, but they had to have some outlet for their activities. In the same way I have always regarded boxing as a first-class sport to encourage in the Young Men’s Christian Association.

I do not like to see young Christians with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle.

Of course boxing should be encouraged in the army and navy. I was first drawn to two naval chaplains, Fathers Chidwick and Rainey, by finding that each of them had bought half a dozen sets of boxing gloves and encouraged their crews in boxing.

He was my sister’s favorite son, and I always took a special interest in him myself. I did my best to bring him up the way he ought to go. But there was just nothing to be done with him.

His tastes were naturally low. He took to music!

” What form this debasing taste for music assumed I did not inquire; and I was able to grant my friend’s wish.

Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves,” to which he promptly responded, “

I think I will leave them on; we might meet ladies!

”

He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened.

After this is kept up long enough it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it.

(I am using my own language, not Marryat’s.) This was the theory upon which I went. There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to “mean” horses and gunfighters;

(I am using my own language, not Marryat’s.) This was the theory upon which I went.

There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to “mean” horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.

Most men can have the same experience if they choose. They will first learn to bear themselves well in trials which they anticipate and which they school themselves in advance to meet.

Almost immediately after leaving Harvard in 1880 I began to take an interest in politics. I did not then believe, and I do not now believe, that any man should ever attempt to make politics his only career.

It is a dreadful misfortune for a man to grow to feel that his whole livelihood and whole happiness depend upon his staying in office.

Such a feeling prevents him from being of real service to the people while in office, and always puts him under the heaviest strain of pressure to barter his convictions for the sake of holding office.

The party was still treated as a private corporation, and in each district the organization formed a kind of social and political club. A man had to be regularly proposed for and elected into this club, just as into any other club.

As a friend of mine picturesquely phrased it, I “had to break into the organization with a jimmy.”

Under these circumstances there was some difficulty in joining the local organization, and considerable amusement and excitement to be obtained out of it after I had joined.

As a matter of fact, there was not the slightest temptation on my part to have any such feeling or any one of such feelings.

I no more expected special consideration in politics than I would have expected it in the boxing ring.

I wished to act squarely to others, and I wished to be able to show that I could hold my own as against others. The attitude of my new friends toward me was first one of polite reserve, and then that of friendly alliance.

for unless there is this feeling of fellowship, of common effort on an equal plane for a common end, it will be difficult to keep the relations wholesome and natural.

To be patronized is as offensive as to be insulted.

No one of us cares permanently to have someone else conscientiously striving to do him good;

We found that in the long run the men who in public blatantly insisted that labor was never wrong were the very men who in private could not be trusted to stand for labor when it was right.

We grew heartily to distrust the reformer who never denounced wickedness unless it was embodied in a rich man.

Human nature does not change; and that type of “reformer” is as noxious now as he ever was.

The judges who rendered this decision were well-meaning men. They knew nothing whatever of tenement house conditions; they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities.

They knew legalism, but not life.

Their choice of the words “hallowed” and “home,” as applicable to the revolting conditions attending the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses, showed that they had no idea what it was that they were deciding.

They knew legalism, but not life. Their choice of the words “hallowed” and “home,” as applicable to the revolting conditions attending the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses, showed that they had no idea what it was that they were deciding.

Imagine the “hallowed” associations of a “home” consisting of one room where two families, one of them with a boarder, live, eat, and work!

This decision completely blocked tenement house reform legislation in New York for a score of years, and hampers it to this day. It was one of the most serious setbacks which the cause of industrial and social progress and reform ever received.

and yet being clean of life will not avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises.

Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting.

Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting.

Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

Like most young men in politics, I went through various oscillations of feeling before I “found myself.”

Nor will clean conduct by itself enable a man to render good service.

I have always been fond of Josh Billings’s remark that “it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.”

There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey.

… the “silk stocking” reformer type, as Abraham Lincoln called it, the gentlemen who were very nice, very refined, who shook their heads over political corruption and discussed it in drawing-rooms and parlors, but who were wholly unable to grapple with real men in real life.

They were apt vociferously to demand “reform” as if it were some concrete substance, like cake, which could be handed out at will, in tangible masses, if only the demand were urgent enough.

These parlor reformers made up for inefficiency in action by zeal in criticising; and they delighted in criticising the men who really were doing the things which they said ought to be done, but which they lacked the sinewy power to do.

Yet there were reformers who shook their heads and deplored my “activity” in the canvass.

Of course the one thing which corrupt machine politicians most desire is to have decent men frown on the activity, that is, on the efficiency, of the honest man who genuinely wishes to reform politics.

If efficiency is left solely to bad men, and if virtue is confined solely to inefficient men, the result cannot be happy.

Of course the one thing which corrupt machine politicians most desire is to have decent men frown on the activity, that is, on the efficiency, of the honest man who genuinely wishes to reform politics.

If efficiency is left solely to bad men, and if virtue is confined solely to inefficient men, the result cannot be happy.

When I entered politics there were, as there always had been—and as there always will be—any number of bad men in politics who were thoroughly efficient, and any number of good men who would like to have done lofty things in politics but who were …

On one occasion he had a bill to appropriate money, with obvious impropriety, for the relief of some miscreant whom he styled “one of the honest yeomanry of the State.”

When I explained to him that it was clearly unconstitutional, he answered, “Me friend, the Constitution don’t touch little things like that,” and then added, with an ingratiating smile, “Anyhow, I’d never allow the Constitution to come between friends.”

At the time I was looking over the proofs of Mr. Bryce’s American Commonwealth, and I told him the incident. He put it into the first edition of the Commonwealth; whether it is in the last edition or not, I cannot say.

There was in the Legislature, during the deadlock above mentioned, a man whom I will call Brogan.

He looked like a serious elderly frog.

I never heard him speak more than once. It was before the Legislature was organized, or had adopted any rules; and each day the only business was for the clerk to call the roll. One day Brogan suddenly rose, and the following dialogue occurred:

But most of the fights in which we were engaged were for pure honesty and decency, and they were more apt to be against that form of corruption which found its expression in demagogy than against that form of corruption which defended or advocated privilege.

Fundamentally, our fight was part of the eternal war against the Powers that Prey; and we cared not a whit in what rank of life these powers were found.

To play the demagogue for purposes of self-interest is a cardinal sin against the people in a democracy, exactly as to play the courtier for such purposes is a cardinal sin against the people under other forms of government.

If such a man is wise, he will gladly do the thing that is next, when the time and the need come together, without asking what the future holds for him.

Let the half-god play his part well and manfully, and then be content to draw aside when the god appears.

Nor should he feel vain regrets that to another it is given to render greater services and reap a greater reward.

and minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped stampedes or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or brimmed with running ice.

We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.

It was right and necessary that this life should pass, for the safety of our country lies in its being made the country of the small homemaker. The great unfenced ranches, in the days of “free grass,” necessarily represented a temporary stage in our history.

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister’s stories and Frederic Remington’s drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo hunter, the soldier and the cowpuncher.

That land of the West has gone now, “gone, gone with lost Atlantis,” gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories.

It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman.

That land of the West has gone now, “gone, gone with lost Atlantis,” gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories.

It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman.

It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of longhorned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we led a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle.

One day when we were cutting down the cottonwood trees, to begin our building operations, I heard someone ask Dow what the total cut had been, and Dow not realizing that I was within hearing, answered:

“Well, Bill cut down fifty-three, I cut forty-nine, and the boss he beavered down seventeen.”

Those who have seen the stump of a tree which has been gnawed down by a beaver will understand the exact force of the comparison.

Fortunately some men who had gotten in late in the morning had had their sleep during the daytime, so that the rest of us escaped night guard and were not called until four next morning.

Nobody ever gets enough sleep on a roundup.

The above was the longest number of consecutive hours I ever had to be in the saddle. But, as I have said, I changed horses five times, and it is a great lightening of labor for a rider to have a fresh horse.

There was only one of them tried to vote, and Bill knocked him down. Lord!” added my friend, meditatively, “the way that man fell!”

“Well,” struck in Bill Jones, “if he hadn’t fell I’d have walked round behind him to see what was propping him up!”

In the days when I lived on the ranch I usually spent most of the winter in the East, and when I returned in the early spring I was always interested in finding out what had happened since my departure.

I asked Bill what he would have done if Snyder hadn’t caught the lunatic. This was evidently a new idea, and he responded that Snyder always did catch him. “Well, but suppose he hadn’t caught him?”

“Well,” said Bill Jones, “if Snyder hadn’t caught the lunatic, I’d have whaled hell out of Snyder!”

Under these circumstances Snyder ran his best and always did catch the patient. It must not be gathered from this that the lunatic was badly treated. He was well treated.

but in each case I knew just what I wanted to do, and, like David Harum, I “did it first,” whereas the fraction of a second that the other man hesitated put him in a position where it was useless for him to resist.

I owe more than I can ever express to the West, which of course means to the men and women I met in the West.

There were a few people of bad type in my neighborhood—that would be true of every group of men, even in a theological seminary—but I could not speak with too great affection and respect of the great majority of my friends, the hardworking men and …

I was always as welcome at their houses as they were at mine.

Everybody worked, everybody was willing to help everybody else, and yet nobody asked any favors.

The same thing was true of the people whom I got to know fifty miles east and fifty miles west of my own range, and of the men I met on the roundups.

Another complained that his mother-in-law had put him in jail for bigamy. In the case of another the incident was more markworthy. I will call him Gritto. He wrote me a letter beginning: “Dear Colonel: I write you because I am in trouble.

I have shot a lady in the eye. But, Colonel, I was not shooting at the lady. I was shooting at my wife

,” which he apparently regarded as a sufficient excuse as between men of the world. I answered that I drew the line at shooting at ladies, and did not hear any more of the incident for several years.

“How did it happen, Ben?” “Well, you see, I was sent to arrest a gentleman, and him and me mixed it up, and he bit off my ear.” “What did you do to the gentleman, Ben?” And Ben, looking more coy than ever, responded:

“Well, Colonel, we broke about even!”

I forebore to inquire what variety of mayhem he had committed on the “gentleman.”

The audience listened to me with rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the chairman: “I held that audience well; there wasn’t an interruption.” To which the chairman replied:

“Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had sent round word that if any son of a gun peeped he’d kill him!”

There was one bit of frontier philosophy which I should like to see imitated in more advanced communities. Certain crimes of revolting baseness and cruelty were never forgiven.

The argument was simple. There had been written examinations in China; it was proposed to establish written examinations in the United States; therefore the proposed system was Chinese. The argument might have been applied still further.

For instance, the Chinese had used gunpowder for centuries; gunpowder is used in Springfield rifles; therefore Springfield rifles were Chinese.

One argument is quite as logical as the other. It was impossible to answer every falsehood about the system. But it was possible to answer certain falsehoods, especially when uttered by some Senator or Congressman of note.

We produced a letter which, thanks to a beneficent Providence, he had himself written about Mr. Rufus P. Putnam, in which he said: “Mr. Rufus P. Putnam is a legal resident of my district and has relatives living there now.”

He explained, first, that he had not written the letter; second, that he had forgotten he had written the letter; and, third, that he was grossly deceived when he wrote it.

He said: “I have not been informed of one applicant who has found a place in the classified service from my district.” We confronted him with the names of eight.

In the underworld of politics the closest ties are sometimes those which knit together the active professional workers of opposite political parties. A friend of mine in the New York Legislature—the hero of the alpha and omega incident—once remarked to me:

“When you have been in public life a little longer, Mr. Roosevelt, you will understand that there are no politics in politics.”

In the politics to which he was referring this remark could be taken literally.

Said I, “Mr. Costigan, you seem to have a great deal of knowledge about this; how did it happen?” To which he replied,

“Come now, Mr. Roosevelt, you know it’s the same gang that votes in all the primaries.”

So much for most of the opposition to the reform. There was, however, some honest and at least partially justifiable opposition both to certain of the methods advocated by Civil Service Reformers and to certain of the Civil Service Reformers themselves.

It had been an interesting fight in more than one way. For instance, the Republican party, at the general election, polled something like five hundred and fifty votes, and yet at the primary the two factions polled seven hundred and twenty-five all told.

The sum of the parts was thus considerably greater than the whole.

There had been other little details that made the contest worthy of note. The hall in which the primary was held had been hired by the Stalwarts from a conscientious gentleman.

Such words as “boss” and “machine” now imply evil, but both the implication the words carry and the definition of the words themselves are somewhat vague.

A leader is necessary; but his opponents always call him a boss. An organization is necessary; but the men in opposition always call it a machine.

Nevertheless, there is a real and deep distinction between the leader and the boss, between organizations and machines.

A gleam came into the old fighter’s eyes and he answered:

“No, I am dying, and you know it. I don’t mind dying; but I do wish it were possible for me to get off into the great north woods and crawl out on a rock in the sun and die like a wolf!”

I never saw him again. When he died I sent a telegram of sympathy to his wife.

It is curious to see how difficult it is to make some men understand that insistence upon one factor does not and must not mean failure fully to recognize other factors.

The selfish individual needs to be taught that we must now shackle cunning by law exactly as a few centuries back we shackled force by law.

Unrestricted individualism spells ruin to the individual himself. But so does the elimination of individualism, whether by law or custom. It is a capital error to fail to recognize the vital need of good laws.

The selfish individual needs to be taught that we must now shackle cunning by law exactly as a few centuries back we shackled force by law.

Unrestricted individualism spells ruin to the individual himself.

But so does the elimination of individualism, whether by law or custom. It is a capital error to fail to recognize the vital need of good laws.

… them to render better and more efficient service, changed me into a zealous instead of a lukewarm adherent of the cause—in spite of the fact that a few of the best women of the same type, women like Mary Antin, did not favor the movement.

A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

The mere possession of the vote will no more benefit men and women not sufficiently developed to use it than the possession of rifles will turn untrained Egyptian fellaheen into soldiers. This is as true of woman as of man—and no more true.

It represented that device of old-school American political thought, the desire to establish checks and balances so elaborate that no man shall have power enough to do anything very bad.

In practice this always means that no man has power enough to do anything good, and that what is bad is done anyhow.

In most positions the “division of powers” theory works unmitigated mischief.

Moreover, all kinds of ways of evading the law were tried, and some of them were successful. The statute, for instance, permitted any man to take liquor with meals.

After two or three months a magistrate was found who decided judicially that seventeen beers and one pretzel made a meal

—after which decision joy again became unconfined in at least some of the saloons, and the yellow press gleefully announced that my “tyranny” had been curbed. But my prime object, that of stopping blackmail, was largely attained.

I suppose the United States will always be unready for war, and in consequence will always be exposed to great expense, and to the possibility of the gravest calamity, when the Nation goes to war. This is no new thing.

Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.

There would have been no war in 1812 if, in the previous decade, America, instead of announcing that “peace was her passion,” instead of acting on the theory that unpreparedness averts war, had been willing to go to the expense of providing a fleet of …

It would have been bad enough if we had been content to be weak, and, in view of our weakness, not to bluster. But we were not content with such a policy.

We wished to enjoy the incompatible luxuries of an unbridled tongue and an unready hand.

There was a very large element which was ignorant of our military weakness, or, naturally enough, unable to understand it; and another large element which liked to please its own vanity by listening to offensive talk about foreign nations.

I believe that war should never be resorted to when, or so long as, it is honorably possible to avoid it. I respect all men and women who from high motives and with sanity and self-respect do all they can to avert war.

I advocate preparation for war in order to avert war; and I should never advocate war unless it were the only alternative to dishonor.

I describe the folly of which so many of our people were formerly guilty, in order that we may in our own day be on our guard against similar folly.

and therefore he usually accomplishes nothing whatever, but is able to satisfy all individuals with red-tape minds by triumphantly pointing out his compliance with the regulations.

In a crisis, the man worth his salt is the man who meets the needs of the situation in whatever way is necessary.

Dewey purchased the coal and was ready to move at once if need arose. The affair blew over; the need to move did not occur;

… than to any other one man was due the astonishing progress made by our fleet in this respect, a progress which made the fleet, gun for gun, at least three times as effective, in point of fighting efficiency, in 1908, as it was in 1902.

The shots that hit are the shots that count!

Like the people, the Government was for a long time unwilling to prepare for war, because so many honest but misguided men believed that the preparation itself tended to bring on the war.

All that was needed with Dewey was to give him the chance to get ready, and then to strike, without being hampered by orders from those not on the ground.

Success in war depends very largely upon choosing a man fit to exercise such powers, and then giving him the powers.

It would be instructive to remember, if only we were willing to do so, the fairly comic panic which swept in waves over our seacoast, first when it became evident that war was about to be declared, and then when it was declared.

Thereupon the people of the seaboard district passed at one bound from unreasoning confidence that war never could come to unreasoning fear as to what might happen now that it had come.

That acute philosopher Mr. Dooley proclaimed that in the Spanish War we were in a dream, but that the Spaniards were in a trance.

This just about summed up the facts. Our people had for decades scoffed at the thought of making ready for possible war.

and when a man takes such a position, he ought to be willing to make his words good by his deeds unless there is some very strong reason to the contrary.

He should pay with his body.

As soon as war was upon us, Wood and I began to try for a chance to go to the front. Congress had authorized the raising of three National Volunteer Cavalry regiments, wholly apart from the State contingents.

He was as anxious as I was that if there were war we should both have our part in it.

I had always felt that if there were a serious war I wished to be in a position to explain to my children why I did take part in it, and not why I did not take part in it.

Moreover, I had very deeply felt that it was our duty to free Cuba, and I had publicly expressed this feeling;

I did not intend to be in any hotel if it could possibly be avoided; and as things turned out, I had no full-dress uniform, nothing but my service uniform, during my brief experience in the army.

I suppose that war always does bring out what is highest and lowest in human nature.

The contractors who furnish poor materials to the army or the navy in time of war stand on a level of infamy only one degree above that of the participants in the white slave traffic themselves.

“Oh, dear! I had this office running in such good shape—and then along came the war and upset everything!”

His feeling was that war was an illegitimate interruption to the work of the War Department.

There were of course department heads and bureau chiefs and assistants who, in spite of the worthlessness of the system, and of the paralyzing conditions that had prevailed, remained first-class men. An example of these was Commissary-General Weston.

We adhered strictly to field equipment, allowing no luxuries or anything else unnecessary, and so we were able to move off the field when ordered, with our own transportation, leaving nothing behind.

I suppose every man tends to brag about his regiment; but it does seem to me that there never was a regiment better worth bragging about than ours.

Wood was an exceptional commander, of great power, with a remarkable gift for organization. The rank and file were as fine natural fighting men as ever carried a rifle or rode a horse in any country or any age.

Then it dawned on us that we were the target.

The bullets began to come overhead, making a sound like the ripping of a silk dress, with sometimes a kind of pop; a few of my men fell, and I deployed the rest, making them lie down and get behind trees.

Richard Harding Davis was with us, and as we scanned the landscape with our glasses it was he who first pointed out to us some Spaniards in a trench some three-quarters of a mile off. It was difficult to make them out.

Both the letter and the round robin were written at General Shafter’s wish, and at the unanimous suggestion of all the commanding and medical officers of the Fifth Army Corps, and both were published by General Shafter.

In a regiment the prime need is to have fighting men; the prime virtue is to be able and eager to fight with the utmost effectiveness.

I have never believed that this was incompatible with other virtues. On the contrary, while there are of course exceptions, I believe that on the average the best fighting men are also the best citizens.

In a regiment the prime need is to have fighting men; the prime virtue is to be able and eager to fight with the utmost effectiveness. I have never believed that this was incompatible with other virtues.

On the contrary, while there are of course exceptions, I believe that on the average the best fighting men are also the best citizens.

I do not believe that a finer set of natural soldiers than the men of my regiment could have been found anywhere, and they were first-class citizens in civil life also. One fact may perhaps be worthy of note.

and death often smote them—as it did the two best officers in my regiment, Allyn Capron and Bucky O’Neil. My men would not have respected me had I acted otherwise. Their creed was my creed.

The life even of the most useful man, of the best citizen, is not to be hoarded if there be need to spend it.

I felt, and feel, this about others; and of course also about myself. This is one reason why I have always felt impatient contempt for the effort to abolish the death penalty on account of sympathy with criminals.

whereupon the mustering-out officer sank back in his chair and remarked, “He was sentenced by a court martial, and the sentence was approved by the major-general commanding the division. You were a lieutenant-colonel, and you pardoned him.

Well, it was nervy, that’s all I’ll say.

”

He said he was sorry, and I answered that he was not as sorry as I was. I then “studied on it,” as Br’r Rabbit would say, and came back with a request for eleven hundred pounds of beans for the officers’ mess.

He said, “Why, Colonel, your officers can’t eat eleven hundred pounds of beans,” to which I responded, “You don’t know what appetites my officers have.”

He then said he would send the requisition to Washington. I told him I was quite willing, so long as he gave me the beans.

We came back to Montauk Point and soon after were disbanded. We had been in the service only a little over four months.

There are no four months of my life to which I look back with more pride and satisfaction.

I believe most earnestly and sincerely in peace, but as things are yet in this world the nation that cannot fight, the people that have lost the fighting edge, that have lost the virile virtues, occupy a position as dangerous as it is ignoble.

I was able to fix the contest in the public mind as one between himself and myself; and, against all probabilities, I won by the rather narrow margin of eighteen thousand plurality.

As I have already said, there is a lunatic fringe to every reform movement.

At least nine-tenths of all the sincere reformers supported me; but the ultra-pacifists, the so-called anti-imperialists, or anti-militarists, or peace-at-any-price men, preferred Croker to me;

The two machines were apt to make common cause if their vital interests were touched. It was my business to devise methods by which either the two machines could be kept apart or else overthrown if they came together.

My desire was to achieve results, and not merely to issue manifestos of virtue.

It is very easy to be efficient if the efficiency is based on unscrupulousness, and it is still easier to be virtuous if one is content with the purely negative virtue which consists in not doing anything wrong, but being wholly unable to accomplish anything …

My favorite quotation from Josh Billings again applies:

It is so much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.

My duty was to combine both idealism and efficiency. At that time the public conscience was still dormant as regards many species of political and business misconduct, as to which during the next decade it became sensitive.

As long as there was no clash between us there was no object in my seeing him; it was only when the clash came or was imminent that I had to see him.

A series of breakfasts was always the prelude to some active warfare.

In every instance I substantially carried my point, although in some cases not in exactly the way in which I had originally hoped.

John Hamlin in a poker game, said: “Hold on! We accept. Send in So-and-so [the man I had named]. The Senator is very sorry, but he will make no further opposition!”

I never saw a bluff carried more resolutely through to the final limit.

My success in the affair, coupled with the appointment of Messrs. Partridge and Hooker, secured me against further effort to interfere with my handling of the executive departments.

In my answer I pointed out to the Senator that I had as Governor unhesitatingly acted, at Buffalo and elsewhere, to put down mobs, without regard to the fact that the professed leaders of labor furiously denounced me for so doing; but that

I could no more tolerate wrong committed in the name of property than wrong committed against property.

My letter ran in part as follows:

… misdeed of the father comes as a crushing disaster to the wife and children, and the people of the community, however bitter originally against the man, grow to feel the most intense sympathy for the bowed-down women and children who suffer for the man’s fault.

It is a dreadful thing in life that so much of atonement for wrongdoing is vicarious.

If it were possible in such a case to think only of the banker’s or county treasurer’s wife and children, any man would pardon the offender at once. Unfortunately, it is not right to think only of the women and children.

There are men who love out-of-doors who yet never open a book; and other men who love books but to whom the great book of nature is a sealed volume, and the lines written therein blurred and illegible.

Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the love of outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand. It is an affectation for the man who is praising outdoors to sneer at books.

Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the love of outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand.

It is an affectation for the man who is praising outdoors to sneer at books.

Usually the keenest appreciation of what is seen in nature is to be found in those who have also profited by the hoarded and recorded wisdom of their fellow-men.

This is what makes it so useless to try to compare the bird songs of one country with those of another.

A man who is worth anything can no more be entirely impartial in speaking of the bird songs with which from his earliest childhood he has been familiar than he can be entirely impartial in speaking of his own family.

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.

I could not name any principle upon which the books have been gathered.

Books are almost as individual as friends.

There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr.

Let me add that ours is in no sense a collector’s library. Each book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it.

We could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much interested in their insides.

Now and then I am asked as to “what books a statesman should read,” and my answer is, poetry and novels—including short stories under the head of novels. I don’t mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry.

only, I enjoy the ballad, and I don’t enjoy the drama; and therefore the ballad is better for me, and this fact is not altered by the other fact that my own shortcomings are to blame in the matter.

I still read a number of Scott’s novels over and over again, whereas if I finish anything by Miss Austen I have a feeling that duty performed is a rainbow to the soul.

But other booklovers who are very close kin to me, and whose taste I know to be better than mine, read Miss Austen all the time—and, moreover, they are very kind, and never pity me in too offensive a manner for not reading her myself.

and at least half the time I regret my action, because it encourages the writer to believe that the public shares my views, and he then finds that the public doesn’t.

Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.

Sagamore Hill is one of three neighboring houses in which small cousins spent very happy years of childhood.

And as for a life deliberately devoted to pleasure as an end—why, the greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a byproduct of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is met in the doing.

There is a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire Bill Widener, of Widener’s Valley, Virginia, which sums up one’s duty in life: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

The country is the place for children, and if not the country, a city small enough so that one can get out into the country.

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

It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone; but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching.

And as for a life deliberately devoted to pleasure as an end—why, the greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a byproduct of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is met in the doing.

When we reached the store, we found to our dismay that the wagon which we had seen had been sold.

We could not bear to return without the promised gift, for we knew that the brains of small persons are much puzzled when their elders seem to break promises.

Fortunately, we saw in the store a delightful little bright-red chair and bright-red table, and these we brought home and handed solemnly over to the expectant recipient, explaining that as there unfortunately was not a “ ’spress” wagon we had brought him back a “ …

Little girl. It didn’t do any such thing.

My monitor always goes to bed at seven, and it’s now quarter past.

My monitor was in bed and couldn’t sink!

And will he bring me back a bear?” When, some five months later, I returned, of course in my uniform, this little boy was much puzzled as to my identity, although he greeted me affably with “Good afternoon, Colonel.”

Half an hour later somebody asked him, “Where’s father?” to which he responded, “I don’t know; but the Colonel is taking a bath.”

Of course the children anthropomorphized—if that is the proper term—their friends of the animal world.

White’s, Myra Kelly’s stories of her little East Side pupils, and Michelson’s Madigans. It is well to take duties, and life generally, seriously.

It is also well to remember that a sense of humor is a healthy antiscorbutic to that portentous seriousness which defeats its own purpose.

Occasionally bits of self-education proved of unexpected help to the children in later years. Like other children, they were apt to take to bed with them treasures which they particularly esteemed.

Next morning Dr. Lambert rather enviously congratulated the boy on the fact that stones and roots evidently did not interfere with the soundness of his sleep; to which the boy responded,

“Well, Doctor, you see it isn’t very long since I used to take fourteen china animals to bed with me every night!”

As the children grew up, Sagamore Hill remained delightful for them. There were picnics and riding parties, there were dances in the north room—sometimes fancy dress dances—and open-air plays on the green tennis court of one of the cousin’s houses.

No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by.

But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.

There are many forms of success, many forms of triumph. But there is no other success that in any shape or way approaches that which is open to most of the many, many men and women who have the right ideals.

In other words, I acted for the public welfare, I acted for the common well-being of all our people, whenever and in whatever manner was necessary, unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative prohibition.

I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power; I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.

The Senate at one time objected to my communicating with them in printing, preferring the expensive, foolish, and laborious practice of writing out the messages by hand. It was not possible to return to the outworn archaism of hand writing;

The letter appointing this Commission laid down nine principles of effective Governmental work, the most striking of which was:

“The existence of any method, standard, custom, or practice is no reason for its continuance when a better is offered.”

This Commission, composed like that just described, of men already charged with important work, performed its functions wholly without cost to the Government.

Thereupon the customary papers went through the customary routine, without unusual delay at any point.

The transaction moved like a glacier with dignity to its appointed end, and the stove reached the infirmary in good order in time for the Indian agent to acknowledge its arrival in these words: “The stove is here. So is spring.”

The Civil Service Commission, under men like John McIlhenny and Garfield, rendered service without which the Government could have been conducted with neither efficiency nor honesty. The politicians were not the only persons at fault;

It did not hurt the party. It helped the party.

A favorite war-cry in American political life has always been, “Turn the rascals out.” We made it evident that, as far as we were concerned, this war-cry was pointless; for we turned our own rascals out.

There were important and successful land fraud prosecutions in several Western States. Probably the most important were the cases prosecuted in Oregon by Francis J. Heney, with the assistance of William J.

… say that these men, and others like them, worked a complete revolution in the enforcement of the Federal laws, and made their offices organized legal machines fit and ready to conduct smashing fights for the people’s rights and to enforce the laws in aggressive fashion.

When I took the Presidency, it was a common and bitter saying that a big man, a rich man, could not be put in jail.

We put many big and rich men in jail; two United States Senators, for instance, and among others two great bankers, one in New York and one in Chicago. One of the United States Senators died, the other served his term.

I believed in the people’s rights, and therefore in National rights and States’ rights just exactly to the degree in which they severally secured popular rights. I believed in invoking the National power with absolute freedom for every National need; and

I believed that the Constitution should be treated as the greatest document ever devised by the wit of man to aid a people in exercising every power necessary for its own betterment, and not as a straitjacket cunningly fashioned to strangle growth.

As for the particular methods of realizing these various beliefs, I was content to wait and see what method might be necessary in each given case as it arose; and I was certain that the cases would arise fast enough.

One of the principles whose application was the source of much hostility was this:

It is better for the Government to help a poor man to make a living for his family than to help a rich man make more profit for his company.

This principle was too sound to be fought openly. It is the kind of principle to which politicians delight to pay unctuous homage in words. But we translated the words into deeds;

I was intimately acquainted with the situation in New York.

The word “panic” means fear, unreasoning fear; to stop a panic it is necessary to restore confidence;

and at the moment the so-called Morgan interests were the only interests which retained a full hold on the confidence of the people of New York—not only the business people, but the immense mass of men and women who owned small investments or had small …

I would have been derelict in my duty, I would have shown myself a timid and unworthy public servant, if in that extraordinary crisis I had not acted precisely as I did act.

In every such crisis the temptation to indecision, to non-action, is great, for excuses can always be found for non-action, and action means risk and the certainty of blame to the man who acts.

But if the man is worth his salt he will do his duty, he will give the people the benefit of the doubt, and act in any way which their interests demand and which is not affirmatively prohibited by law, unheeding the likelihood that he …

they did not object to my exercising any latitude I chose in the appointments so long as they were made under the headings they had given.

I shall never forget the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept it with rapture;

it gave me an illuminating glimpse into one corner of the mighty brains of these “captains of industry.”

… conditions under which they lived to unite in unions of their industry or trade, and these unions were bound to grow in size, in strength, and in power for good and evil as the industries in which the men were employed grew larger and larger.

A democracy can be such in fact only if there is some rough approximation in similarity in stature among the men composing it.

One of us can deal in our private lives with the grocer or the butcher or the carpenter or the chicken raiser, or if we are the grocer or carpenter or butcher or farmer, we can deal with our customers, because we are all of …

Then the men who had not dared to raise their voices until all danger was past came bravely forth from their hiding places and denounced the action which had saved them.

They had kept a hushed silence when there was danger; they made clamorous outcry when there was safety in doing so.

Just the same course would have been followed in connection with the Anthracite Coal Strike if I had been obliged to act in the fashion I intended to act had I failed to secure a voluntary agreement between the miners and the operators.

Of course, in labor controversies it was not always possible to champion the cause of the workers, because in many cases strikes were called which were utterly unwarranted and were fought by methods which cannot be too harshly condemned.

No straightforward man can believe, and no fearless man will assert, that a trade union is always right.

That man is an unworthy public servant who by speech or silence, by direct statement or cowardly evasion, invariably throws the weight of his influence on the side of the trade union, whether it is right or wrong.

No straightforward man can believe, and no fearless man will assert, that a trade union is always right.

That man is an unworthy public servant who by speech or silence, by direct statement or cowardly evasion, invariably throws the weight of his influence on the side of the trade union, whether it is right or wrong.

It has occasionally been my duty to give utterance to the feelings of all right thinking men by expressing the most emphatic disapproval of unwise or even immoral notions by representatives of labor.

Because of things I have done on behalf of justice to the workingman, I have often been called a Socialist. Usually I have not taken the trouble even to notice the epithet.

I am not afraid of names, and I am not one of those who fear to do what is right because someone else will confound me with partisans with whose principles I am not in accord.

Moreover, I know that many American Socialists are high-minded and honorable citizens, who in reality are merely radical social reformers. They are oppressed by the brutalities and industrial injustices which we see everywhere about us.

… in common, both as partners in industry and as citizens of the republic, and that where these interests are apart they can be adjusted by so altering our laws and their interpretation as to secure to all members of the community social and industrial justice.

I have always maintained that our worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change.

Such men seem to believe that the four and a half million Progressive voters, who in 1912 registered their solemn protest against our social and industrial injustices, are “anarchists,” who are not willing to let ill enough alone.

I treated anarchists and the bomb-throwing and dynamiting gentry precisely as I treated other criminals.

Murder is murder. It is not rendered one whit better by the allegation that it is committed on behalf of “a cause.”

It is true that law and order are not all sufficient; but they are essential; lawlessness and murderous violence must be quelled before any permanence of reform can be obtained.

No nation can claim rights without acknowledging the duties that go with the rights.

It is a contemptible thing for a great nation to render itself impotent in international action, whether because of cowardice or sloth, or sheer inability or unwillingness to look into the future.

and it is almost as bad to undertake responsibilities and then not fulfill them. During the seven and a half years that I was President, this Nation behaved in international matters toward all other nations precisely as an honorable man behaves to his fellow-men.

We made no promise which we could not and did not keep. We made no threat which we did not carry out.

We never failed to assert our rights in the face of the strong, and we never failed to treat both strong and weak with courtesy and justice;

Apparently the Senators in question felt that in some way they had upheld their dignity.

All that they had really done was to shirk their duty. Somebody had to do that duty, and accordingly I did it.

I went ahead and administered the proposed treaty anyhow, considering it as a simple agreement on the part of the Executive which would be converted into a treaty whenever the Senate acted.

When she thought we were committed, she refused to fulfill the agreement, with the avowed hope of seizing the French company’s property for nothing and thereby holding us up.

This was a bit of pure bandit morality.

It would have achieved its purpose had I possessed as weak moral fiber as those of my critics who announced that I ought to have confined my action to feeble scolding and temporizing until the opportunity for action passed.

I did not lift my finger to incite the revolutionists. The right simile to use is totally different.

I simply ceased to stamp out the different revolutionary fuses that were already burning.

When Colombia committed flagrant wrong against us, I considered it no part of my duty to aid and abet her in her wrongdoing at our expense, and also at the expense of Panama, of the French company, and of the world generally.

or else they write well-meaning, solemn little books, or pamphlets or editorials, and articles in magazines or newspapers, to show that it is “an illusion” to believe that war ever pays, because it is expensive.

This is precisely like arguing that we should disband the police and devote our sole attention to persuading criminals that it is “an illusion” to suppose that burglary, highway robbery and white slavery are profitable.

It is almost useless to attempt to argue with these well-intentioned persons, because they are suffering under an obsession and are not open to reason. They go wrong at the outset, for they lay all the emphasis on peace and none at all on righteousness.

It is almost useless to attempt to argue with these well-intentioned persons, because they are suffering under an obsession and are not open to reason.

They go wrong at the outset, for they lay all the emphasis on peace and none at all on righteousness.

They are not all of them physically timid men; but they are usually men of soft life; and they rarely possess a high sense of honor or a keen patriotism.

One class of our citizens indulges in gushing promises to do everything for foreigners, another class offensively and improperly reviles them; and it is hard to say which class more thoroughly misrepresents the sober, self-respecting judgment of the American people as a whole.

The only safe rule is to promise little, and faithfully to keep every promise; to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

A prime need for our nation, as of course for every other nation, is to make up its mind definitely what it wishes, and not to try to pursue paths of conduct incompatible one with the other.

Those who advocate such a policy do not occupy a lofty position. But at least their position is understandable.

It is entirely inexcusable, however, to try to combine the unready hand with the unbridled tongue.

It is folly to permit freedom of speech about foreigners as well as ourselves—and the peace-at-any-price persons are much too feeble a folk to try to interfere with freedom of speech—and yet to try to shirk the consequences of freedom of speech.

I determined on the move without consulting the Cabinet, precisely as I took Panama without consulting the Cabinet.

A council of war never fights, and in a crisis the duty of a leader is to lead and not to take refuge behind the generally timid wisdom of a multitude of councillors.

At that time, as I happen to know, neither the English nor the German authorities believed it possible to take a fleet of great battleships round the world.

He had fixed above his head a large paper with some lines evidently designed to forestall any questions from friendly would-be hosts:

“I am delighted with the Australian people. I think your harbor the finest in the world. I am very tired and would like to go to sleep.”

The most noteworthy incident of the cruise was the reception given to our fleet in Japan. In courtesy and good breeding, the Japanese can certainly teach much to the nations of the Western world.