Top 500 Theodore Roosevelt Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Constructive change offers the best method for avoiding destructive change.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

252. “We face the future with our past and our present as guarantors of our promises; and we are content to stand or to fall by the record which we have made and are making.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

253. “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

254. “A leader is an average, everyday person who is highly motivated.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

255. “The chief factor in any man’s success or failure must be his own character.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

256. “Performance should be made square with promise.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

257. “The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

258. “The foes from whom we pray to be delivered are our own passions, appetites, and follies; and against these there is always need that we should war.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Theodore Roosevelt

260. “A good shot must necessarily be a good man since the essence of good marksmanship is self-control and self-control is the essential quality of a good man.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

261. “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.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

262. “The wolf is the arch type of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

263. “To hell with the Constitution when people want coal!”

— Theodore Roosevelt

264. “The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

265. “The worst lesson that can be taught to a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

266. “There is nothing more practical than the preservation of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions of mankind.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

267. “The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the asking, for the edges of the wilderness lie close beside the beaten roads of the present travel.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Theodore Roosevelt

269. “There are rainy days in autumn and stormy days in winter when the rocking chair in front of the fire simply demands an accompanying book.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

270. “A just war is in the long run far better for a man’s soul than the most prosperous peace.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

271. “Give a man a soccer ball, he plays for a moment. Teach a man to play soccer, he plays for a life time.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

272. “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

273. “Councils of War never fight.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

274. “I’m as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the limit.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

275. “In battle, the ONLY bullets that count are those that hit.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

276. “I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

277. “We here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

278. “The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

279. “We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Theodore Roosevelt

281. “I hate a man who skins the land.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

282. “The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men, their greed and arrogance, and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

283. “There is need of a sound body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character-the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

284. “I put myself in the way of things happening, and they happened.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Theodore Roosevelt

286. “There is no moral difference between gambling at cards or in lotteries or on the race track and gambling in the stock market. One method is just pernicious to the body politic as the other kind.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

287. “I always keep my weather eye on the opposition of my seventh house Moon to my first house Mars.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Theodore Roosevelt

289. “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

290. “When money comes in at the gate, sport flies out at the window.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

291. “Never trust a man who says he is only a little crooked, and that the crookedness is exercised in your interest.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

292. “The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

293. “If we are to be really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

294. “There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

295. “Nothing is gained by debate on non-debatable subjects.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

296. “Obedience of the law is demanded; not asked as a favor.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

297. “Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

298. “To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

299. “When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not guilty.’”

— Theodore Roosevelt

300. “The vice of envy is not only a dangerous, but a mean vice; for it is always a confession of inferiority. It may promote conduct which will be fruitful of wrong to others, and it must cause misery to the man who feels it.”

— Theodore Roosevelt