Teddy Roosevelt

I congratulate you thereon.

The American people by a great plurality have conferred upon you the highest honor in their gift.

Like all other good citizens, I accept the result with entire good humor and contentment.

Don’t you pity me. I am all right.

I am all right and you cannot escape listening to the speech either.

I am absorbed in the success of that movement.

I want every labor man, every labor leader, every organized union man, to take the lead in denouncing crime or violence.

I don’t know anything about who the man was who shot me to-night.

I have just been shot.

I wish to say that the Progressive Party is making its appeal to all our fellow citizens without any regard to their creed or to their birthplace.

I am not sick at all. I am all right.

It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.

I will accept the nomination for President if it is tendered to me, and I will adhere to this decision until the convention has expressed its preference.

Therefore I hope that so far as possible the people may be given the chance, through direct primaries, to express their preference as to who shall be the nominee of the Republican Presidential Convention.

I deeply appreciate your letter, and I realize to the full the heavy responsibility it puts upon me.

One of the chief principles for which I have stood, and for which I now stand, and which I have always endeavored and always shall endeavor to reduce to action, is the genuine rule of the people.

I absolutely agree with you that this matter is not one to be decided with any reference to the personal preferences or interests of any man, but purely from the standpoint of the interests of the people as a whole.

I speak of the men of the past partly that they may be honored by our praise of them, but more that they may serve as examples for the future.

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results.

Our country—this great Republic—means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show…

I care for the great deeds of the past chiefly as spurs to drive us onward in the present.

We must drive the special interests out of politics.

No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life.

A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics.