Top 500 Theodore Roosevelt Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Theodore Roosevelt

403. “No greater wrong can ever be done than to put a good man at the mercy of a bad, while telling him not to defend himself or his fellows; in no way can the success of evil be made surer or quicker.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

404. “The ordinary air fighter is an extraordinary man and the extraordinary air fighter stands as one in a million among his fellows.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

405. “Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

406. “Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over any success or defeat.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

407. “Almost every man who has by his life-work added to the sum of human achievement of which the race is proud, of which our people are proud, almost every such man has based his life-work largely upon the teachings of the Bible.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

408. “We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

409. “The one being abhorrent to the powers above the earth and under them is the hyphenated American.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

410. “No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

411. “There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

412. “Mother went off for three days to New York and Mame and Quentin took instant advantage of her absence to fall sick. Quentin’s sickness was surely due to a riot in candy and ice-cream with chocolate sauce.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

413. “It is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty, and intelligence.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

414. “Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

415. “No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

416. “There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

417. “Laws are essential emanations from the self-poised character of God; they radiate from the sun to the circling edge of creation. Verily, the mighty Lawgiver hath subjected himself unto laws.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

418. “To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

419. “If I have erred, I err in company with Abraham Lincoln.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

420. “No man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Theodore Roosevelt

422. “If we would have our citizens contented and law-abiding, we must not sow the seeds of discontent in childhood by denying children their birthright of play.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

423. “More and more, as it becomes necessary to preserve the game, let us hope that the camera will largely supplant the rifle.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

424. “It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

425. “Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

426. “A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

427. “When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer have perished.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

428. “The man who holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

429. “A small politician, of low capacity and mean surroundings, proud to act as the servile tool of men worse than himself but also stronger and abler.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

430. “In doing your work in the great world, it is a safe plan to follow a rule I once heard on the football field: Don’t flinch, don’t fall; hit the line hard.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

431. “No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

432. “We have duties to others, and duties to ourselves, and we cannot shirk either.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

433. “A true forest is not merely a storehouse full of wood, but, as it were, a factory of wood.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

434. “My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

435. “From its origin to the present hour, in all its vicissitudes, Masonry has been the steady unwearing friend of man.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

436. “I believe that there should be a very much heavier progressive tax on very large incomes, a tax which should increase in a very marked fashion for the gigantic incomes.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

437. “I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

438. “Property belongs to man and not man to property.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Theodore Roosevelt

440. “It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worthhearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own business.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

441. “We will send ships and Marines as soon as possible for the protection of American life and property.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

442. “We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

443. “The American people abhor a vacuum.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

444. “I wish that all Americans would realize that American politics is world politics.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

445. “Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

446. “It pays no matter what comes after it, to try and do things, to accomplish things in this life and not merely to have a soft and pleasant time.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

447. “The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

448. “Abraham Lincoln – the spirit incarnate of those who won victory in the Civil War – was the true representative of this people, not only for his own generation, but for all time, because he was a man among men.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

449. “Even in ordinary times there are very few of us who do not see the problems of life as through a glass, darkly; and when the glass is clouded by the murk of furious popular passion, the vision of the best and the bravest is dimmed.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

450. “I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates.”

— Theodore Roosevelt