Teddy Roosevelt

Let us see to it that we leave to our children unimpaired and improved the heritage we received from our fathers.

If that man is the average American, America is going to continue to be all right; and if the average goes below that you can not make the country right.

You can not have good public life unless you have as a basis good private life.

The candidate is the candidate of a party; but if the President is worth his salt he is the President of the whole people.

The questions of currency or the tariff are of no consequence compared to the fundamental questions, the questions upon which all good Americans should be one—the questions of decency in the life of the home and of honesty in public life.

The horrible effects of lynch law are shown in the fact that three-fourths of the lynchings are not for that crime at all, but for other crimes.

To avenge one hideous crime by another hideous crime is to reduce the man doing it to the bestial level of the wretch who committed the bestial crime.

If we substitute for the line that divides the decent man from the man who is not decent, the line dividing the rich man from the poor man, or the line making any other artificial division, we will have done irreparable wrong to the Nation…

What as a nation we need is to stand by the eternal, immutable principles of right and decency, the principle of fair dealing as between man and man, the principles that teach us to regard virtue with respect and vice with abhorrence…

In public life the man who seeks to persuade you that he will benefit you by wronging any one else, if the chance arises, will surely try to benefit himself by wronging you.

The man who is true to you will ultimately be the man who is true to the great fundamental principles of righteousness.

Distrust the man who would persuade you that he would do you good by trying to do any other man harm.

In the same way the man who preaches the gospel of hate and envy toward his fellows who are better off, if he becomes better off will oppress the men whom he once championed.

You show me a rich man who is arrogant and insolent in his disregard of the man of less means, and I tell you that same man, if he loses his wealth, will want to plunder every rich man.

Remember that the rancorous envy that hates the rich is only one side of the shield whose obverse is the insolence and arrogance that looks down on the poor.

Republics have flourished before now, and have fallen; and they have usually fallen because there arose within them parties that represented either the unscrupulous rich or the unscrupulous poor, and that persuaded the majority of the…

Distrust more than any other man in this Republic the man who would try to teach Americans to substitute loyalty to any class for loyalty to the whole American people.

If he is a square man, no matter how much or how little money he has, stand by him because he is a square man.

If he is not a rich man and crooked, hold it against him, still because he is crooked.

If he is a crooked man and rich, hold it against him, not because he is rich, but because he is crooked.

Do not hold it for him or against him that he is either rich or poor.

We must now see that there never comes any spirit of class antagonism in this country, any spirit of hostility between capitalist and wage-worker, between employer and employed; and we can avoid the upgrowth of any such feeling by…

Thank heaven, we are free now from all danger of sectional antagonism!

Arkansas, the New England States, the Western, the Eastern, the Northern, the Southern—they are all good States and I am for them all.

I am fortunate in being President of a nation where you do not have to praise one State by running down any other State.