What I desire to see you feel is that you must have a high ideal; that you must also apply that ideal in practice; and above all things to avoid the state of mind in which you preach an impossible idealism, and make amends for it by not…
Teddy Roosevelt
The Public Record
Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. A member of the Republican Party, he was born on October 27, 1858, in New York. Roosevelt was a prominent leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for domestic policies that included trust-busting, regulation of corporations, and conservation of natural resources. His administration is noted for significant reforms and the establishment of national parks and forests.
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Have high ideals, and then try to realize them in practical shape.
Have a high ideal and try to realize it, measurably, within your powers, as, immeasurably and with tremendous power, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington strove to realize their ideals.
If you choose to have high ideals so fantastic that they are of no use when you try to apply them in practical life, do not for one moment delude yourself into the belief that to have these fantastic ideals shows that you are more virtuous…
If you have to choose, of course I would a great deal rather see you choose high and fantastic ideals than low and practical ones, because the last are a detriment to the Nation at large, while the first are merely of no earthly…
I do not want you ever to get into a frame of mind which we see pretty often in the world at large, which believes that you can only have either high or fantastic ideals, or else low and practical ones.
In the first place, it is a bad thing for Troy if Troy will not stand idealism; and in the next place it is a poor type of ideal that is of no use in Troy.
I was struck and amused by the sentence in which the speaker said that at present if you spoke of ideals, you met with the answer, “Oh, yes, that is very pretty in theory, but it won’t work in Troy!” There are two sides to that.
If I am not greatly in error we are now about to see a similar awakening to the wealth of beauty contained in the Celtic sagas; and I wish to see American institutions of learning take the lead in that awakening.
A century and over ago the civilized world, which had been looking down upon old Norse poetry as the production of a barbarous race, suddenly awoke to the wealth of beauty contained in the Scandinavian sagas.
In this country of ours we are developing a new type of nationality, a type kin to each of the various Old World races from which it in part springs, and yet separate from all.
The man is a poor citizen, no matter how high he stands in the church, whose allegiance to the teachings of the church is limited to his home and to Sunday, and is not carried into his work or his business.
In other words, he needs to carry himself in public life as he would in private life, and never permit the mistake being made of divorcing public from private morality any more than of divorcing domestic from business morality.
The same homely virtues apply in managing the life of a nation as in managing an individual’s life.
I have scant patience with the brawler, the quarreler, the swashbuckler, and I have a little less for the anæmic person, either of body or soul, who believes that a nation any more than an individual can afford to put peace before justice.
The peace granted contemptuously to the weakling and the coward is but a poor boon after it has been granted.
But peace of a valuable type comes not to the man who craves it because he is afraid, but to the man who demands it because it is right.
No man in public position can, under penalty of forfeiting the right to the respect of those whose regard he most values, fail as the opportunity comes to do all that in him lies for peace.
I hope most earnestly for the day when we shall see peace prevail among the nations of mankind; and peace, industrial as well as military, prevail within the nations themselves.
In these universities the benefit comes from the education of a man’s character as well as of his intellect.
The better educated a man is the more dangerous he is if he has no conscience.
I want to see the intellect developed only in so far as it is controlled by conscience, by a sense of right and wrong.
Each of you as you lead your lives will be hurt a good deal; if you have any pluck in you at all you will face the punishment, take it, and win out in spite of it.
I do not give a snap of my finger for the young fellow who is afraid of being hurt physically, or in any other way; he is not going to amount to anything in after life.
I believe in character a great deal more than in either; and I believe in both the body and the mind chiefly as the foundation for the character.
Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt
