Top 30 Edmund Morris Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.”

— Edmund Morris

2. “History admires the wise, but elevates the brave.”

— Edmund Morris

3. “Later he wrote to Lodge: “I don’t grudge the broken arm a bit... I’m always ready to pay the piper when I’ve had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.”

— Edmund Morris

4. “Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.”

— Edmund Morris

5. “Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe – not to mention the maquettes in Rodin’s studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.”

— Edmund Morris

6. “Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature.”

— Edmund Morris

7. “Roosevelt gazed around the library. A glint in his spectacles betrayed displeasure. Loeb came up inquiringly, and there was a whispered conversation in which the words newspapermen and sufficient room were audible. Hurrying outside, Loeb returned with two dozen delighted scribes. They proceeded to report the subsequent ceremony with a wealth of detail unmatched in the history of presidential inaugurations.”

— Edmund Morris

8. “Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor’s historic threat of violence against capital.”

— Edmund Morris

9. “It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them.”

— Edmund Morris

10. “Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.”

— Edmund Morris

11. “There goes the most remarkable man I ever met. Unless I am badly mistaken, the world is due to hear from him one of these days.”

— Edmund Morris

12. “Of all broken reeds,” Roosevelt declared, “sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.”

— Edmund Morris

13. “Washburn noticed how courteous the Colonel was to servants, and how he talked with equal animation about his gardener and the King of Italy.”

— Edmund Morris

14. “It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions.”

— Edmund Morris

15. “In El Paso,” the President said approvingly, “the people are homicidal but orthodox.”

— Edmund Morris

16. “Roosevelt conceded that “some of the evils of which you complain are real and can be to a certain degree remedied, but not by the remedies you propose.” But most would disappear if there were more of “that capacity for steady, individual self-help which is the glory of every true American.” Legislation could no more do away with them “than you could do away with the bruises which you receive when you tumble down, by passing an act to repeal the laws of gravitation.”

— Edmund Morris

17. “I told him he must treat the political audience as one coming, not to see an etching, but a poster,” he said to Jusserand and Archie Butt. “He must, therefore, have streaks of blue, yellow, and red to catch the eye, and eliminate all fine lines and soft colors.”

— Edmund Morris

18. “The flood became an embarrassment for Roosevelt. Did all these men imagine they were buying him? “Corporate cunning has developed faster than the laws of nation and state,” he remarked to the reporter Lindsay Denison. “Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.”

— Edmund Morris

19. “In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others.”

— Edmund Morris

20. “To live, for him, has no meaning other than to drive oneself, to act with all one’s strength. An existence without stress, without struggle, without growth has always struck him as mindless. Those who remain on the sidelines he sees as cowards, and consequently his personal enemies.”

— Edmund Morris

21. “Thanks to herculean skinning and salting by Heller and Mearns, he can congratulate himself on having shipped, via the railway to Mombasa, “a collection of large animals such as has never been obtained for any other museum in the world on a single trip.” The.”

— Edmund Morris

22. “One person who met him during these dark days was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. After watching Roosevelt in action at a literary dinner table, and afterward dispensing summary justice in the police courts, Stoker wrote in his diary: “Must be President some day. A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.”

— Edmund Morris

23. “Well, we seem to have it.”

— Edmund Morris

24. “We had no longing for excessive wealth: a mere competency, though earned by daily toil, so that it was reasonably sure, and free from the drag of continued indebtedness to others, was all we coveted.”

— Edmund Morris

25. “It is true, as the champions of the extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.”

— Edmund Morris

26. “There are floods of praise coming in as well as criticism.”

— Edmund Morris

27. “Indeed, until one tries it for himself, it is incredible what dignity there is in an old hat, what virtue in a time-worn coat, and how savory the dinner-table can be made without sirloin steaks and cranberry tarts.”

— Edmund Morris

28. “He castigates his habitual targets, “the dull, the feeble, and the timid good,” and proclaims himself a strong man, careless of class, color, or party politics. “If I find a public servant who is dishonest, I will chop his head off if he is the highest Republican in this municipality!”

— Edmund Morris

29. “Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals.”

— Edmund Morris

30. “Immersion in no way affected Roosevelt’s cheerful volubility. “I never saw a man who talked so much,” Rondon marveled. “I used to love to watch him think... for he always gesticulated. He would be alone, not saying a word, yet his hands would be moving, and he would be waving his arms and nodding his head with the greatest determination, as though arguing with somebody else.”

— Edmund Morris

31. “Roosevelt followed it8 with a quirky essay in The Outlook entitled “Dante and the Bowery,” arguing that literary stylists had grown too precious in eschewing contemporary imagery. There was as much epic grandeur and poignant example to be found in modern life, he suggested, as there was in Greek myth, or for that matter, thirteenth-century cosmology.”

— Edmund Morris

32. “Edison averaged one patent for every ten to twelve days of his adult life.”

— Edmund Morris

33. “Doctor,” came the reply, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.”

— Edmund Morris

34. “As for the accusation that he, Roosevelt, belonged to the landlord class, “if you had any conception of the true American spirit you would know that we do not have ‘classes’ at all on this side of the water.”

— Edmund Morris