Teddy Roosevelt

There is no appreciable influx of Chinese laborers, and there is not the slightest or most remote danger of any; the whole scare that has been worked up on the subject is a pure chimera.

You hamper me in the effort to get for you what I think you ought to have in connection with the eight-hour law, when you make a request that is indefensible, and to grant which would mean indefinite delay and injury to the work on the…

The conditions are so utterly different on the Isthmus, as compared to here, that it is impossible to try to draw conclusions affecting the one from what is true about the other.

The conditions that make the eight-hour law proper here have no possible reference to the conditions that make the eight-hour law entirely improper there.

But the conditions of labor, such as we have to work with in the tropics, are so absolutely different that there is no possible analogy between them; and an eight-hour law for the Panama Canal is an absurdity.

I believe emphatically in the eight-hour law for our own people in our own country.

But understand me, gentlemen; if I ever thought it necessary, if I thought a combination of laborers were doing wrong, I would apply for an injunction against them just as quick as against so many capitalists.

As for the right of injunction, it is absolutely necessary to have this power lodged in the courts; though of course any abuse of the power is strongly to be reprobated.

It goes as far as I personally think it should go in limiting the right of injunction; at any rate, no arguments have hitherto been advanced which make me think it should go farther.

Good teamwork is as much needed in the executive civil service as it can possibly be anywhere else.

No matter how well a bureau or division may be organized and directed, you can not get the best work out of it unless it is associated with, and co-operating with, the other bureaus and divisions which are engaged in cognate lines of work…

It is one of the most serious of all the obstacles to good executive work, to effective work, and to economy in the public service.

As I have said before, remember that in the vastly larger number of cases the essential need will not be for new legislation, but for better organization and improved methods under existing law.

But never hesitate for a moment in basing your recommendations upon the conditions actually found and the best way to meet them, no matter how radical may be the departure from established methods required.

I want a general scheme, but also a way to make that general scheme effective in each department, each bureau, each section and subdivision touched by your committee.

I believe in broad principles, but I do not want them so broad that they will not apply to any given case.

As Ruskin has said, there are two ways of doing work; to work for the fee, for the payment, and to work for the work’s own sake.

The doing the duty is of itself a sufficient reward for any man.

There never was an army that amounted to anything in campaign or in battle unless the average soldier had in him the spirit which made him regard the winning of the campaign, the winning of the battle, as in itself the end, and his…

He did not care to have his name known, he did not desire to be immortalized in connection with the work; he cared only to make the work itself the best that it could possibly be made.

Each was made by a number of men, architects and builders, each of whom felt amply rewarded by the mere fact that he was able to put all the best that there was in him into his work.

The most magnificent architecture that our race has ever been able to produce—the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages—were made, not by any known architect, not even by any number of architects whose names have ever been recorded.

The good results of seventy men studying local methods and local needs on the ground, in the departments, does not lie only in the knowledge gained; you render a great service by making the men with whom you come in contact feel that they…

The paper work must be subordinated in the departments and bureaus to the efficiency of the work itself, keeping only enough of it to make a record of what is done.

I remarked that I did not care a snap of my finger about the number of bottles of violet ink on the ship, that what I wanted to know was whether the men at the guns could shoot; I did not accept the knowledge of the whereabouts of the…