Teddy Roosevelt

You have shown that you appreciated the fact that to be a good citizen a man has got to handle himself not with a view to shirking difficulties but to meeting them and overcoming them.

The law must get at the big man who goes wrong just as it gets at the small man who goes wrong.

Violence of the individual, above all, violence of a mob—that type of violence—is incompatible with free government, with free and orderly liberty in our republic.

I pity no man because he has got to work.

Both must be put down.

Vermont has always played far more than her part to which she was by population entitled in the affairs of the country.

I believe in preaching, but I believe in practice a good deal more.

You ought not to want to see it anyway; but only now and then comes the chance to do the good work in war.

Here in America we pride ourselves on our liberty under the law—a very different thing from lawlessness.

It is a great thing to have had forefathers who did their work well in the world.

It is not enough, gentlemen, to mean well either in battle or in civil life; you not only had to mean well, you had to do well, and it is the same thing in civil life.

I ask for honesty. I ask for courage.

The first requisite of liberty, as we and our forefathers have known it, is the willingness to abide by the law.

For that I do not pity them. I admire them.

The best is none too good for this Republic.

I think there is but one class of people who deserve as well as the soldiers and those are they who teach the children of the present how to be the masters of our country in the future.

I despise the man who will not work.

The good citizenship has to come from the people themselves.

There is no royal road to good government any more than there is a royal road to learning.

It has been to me a very great pleasure to visit your State, and above all, to meet your people.

You can give a child every advantage, give him books and the teachers, but he has got to learn, he has got to do that himself.

You can frame laws and have a good constitution, and after all has been done that you can do in that way you have accomplished simply the creating of conditions which render it possible to have good citizenship.

You have hay and stock farms outside, and you, therefore, have in this community the farmer and the towns man, the employer and the wage worker.

You have manufactories in your town—shoes, linen, underwear.

Now, the grand problem that we should set before us is to keep prosperity, but above all never, under any circumstances, to lend ourselves to the leadership of any who appeal to the baser passions of mankind.