Teddy Roosevelt

The only way to do in building up the Navy is to keep on with it.

The best possible assurance against war is an adequate navy.

The surest guarantee of peace is an adequate Navy.

We have met to commemorate a mighty pioneer feat, a feat of the old days, when men needed to call upon every ounce of courage and hardihood and manliness they possessed in order ta make good our claim to this continent.

We can glory now in the deeds of Manilla and Santiago, because for the dozen years before our people were building up the Navy.

I ask that you show your appreciation of what the Navy did in '98, that you show your appreciation of what was done in the past by the pioneers who won this land by making ready for the future.

If we do not, then our children when they look back for cause of pride in our history will have to skip our generation.

Base is the man who inflicts wrong, and base is the man who suffers a wrong to be done him.

It is a good thing to cheer her, but it is a better thing to see that we keep on building other ships like her, but even better.

I ask that we, the inheritors of the glory of the men who founded the Republic under Washington, of the men who saved it under Lincoln, in our turn play our part and do aright the lesser tasks of today.

Whether we wish it or not we have to be a great power; we have to play a great part.

I should be ashamed of you if you were not, living in such a state as this.

I only wish it had been possible to make it eight times as much instead.

It is a great pleasure to see you to-day.

We cannot be dragged up, we have got to push ourselves up.

The essential thing in any State is the character of the average man or woman.

Success will come in the long run to the man or the nation possessing the attributes that have conquered success from the days when we first have written records of the nations of mankind.

I am glad to meet all of you.

There is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

It is just so in civil life, and the man has to be a decent man, a square man, a man who acts square by his neighbors, fairly by the State, or he cannot amount to anything;

I hardly think that you yourselves can realize what a wonderful State it is, a State as large and as diversified as many an Old World empire.

Our government is based upon the rule of a self-respecting majority.

I am impressed, as every man must be, with what our nation is to have within its borders a State such as this.

This State is in boundaries and resources greater than many an Old World empire; and think what it is to be a citizen of a Union in which a commonwealth like this is a State.

There is no patent recipe for making a good citizen any more than there is any patent recipe for making a successful man.