Teddy Roosevelt

The man who will not work hard for his wife and his little ones, the woman who shrinks from bearing and rearing many healthy children, these have no place among the men and women who are striving upward and onward.

A man must be a good son, husband, and father, a woman a good daughter, wife, and mother, first and foremost.

In social and industrial no less than in political reform we can do healthy work, work fit for a free Republic, fit for self-governing democracy, only by treading in the footsteps of Washington and Franklin and Adams and Patrick Henry, and…

Woe to us as a nation if we ever follow the lead of men who seek not to smother but to inflame the wild-beast qualities of the human heart!

Envy, malice, and hatred are such passions, and they are just as bad if directed against a class or group of men as if directed against an individual.

The truth is that each one of us has in him certain passions and instincts which if they gained the upper hand in his soul would mean that the wild beast had come uppermost in him.

The vice of envy is not only a dangerous but also a mean vice, for it is always a confession of inferiority.

From the days when the chosen people received the Decalogue to our own, envy and malice have been recognized as evils, and woe to those who appeal to them.

It is far better, for instance, to do well a bit of work which is well worth doing, than to have a large fortune.

There is degradation to us if we feel envy and malice and hatred toward our neighbor for any cause; and if we envy him merely his riches, we show we have ourselves low ideals.

When there is need of a drastic remedy, apply it, but do not apply it in the spirit of hate.

We have no business to blink evils, and where it is necessary that the knife should be used, let it be used unsparingly, but let it be used intelligently.

Our energies, as a rule, can be employed to much better advantage in uplifting some than in pulling down others.

Speaking broadly, we can not in the long run benefit one man by the downfall of another.

It ought to be unnecessary to say that any man who tries to solve the great problems that confront us by an appeal to anger and passion, to ignorance and folly, to malice and envy, is not, and never can be, aught but an enemy of the very…

I really do not know which quality is most productive of evil to mankind in the long run, hardness of heart or softness of head.

It is eminently desirable that we should none of us be hard-hearted, but it is no less desirable that we should not be soft-headed.

We must retain our self-respect, each and all of us, and we must beware alike of mushy sentimentality and of envy and hatred.

No one of us can do everything, but each of us can do something, and if we work together the aggregate of these somethings will be very considerable.

The power of the forces of evil has been greatly increased, and it is necessary for our self-preservation that we should similarly strengthen the forces for good.

Voluntary action by individuals in the form of associations of any kind for mutual betterment or mutual advantage often offers a way to avoid alike the dangers of State control and the dangers of excessive individualism.

The best work for our uplifting must be done by ourselves, and yet with brotherly kindness for our neighbor.

The feeling of brotherhood is necessarily as remote from a patronizing spirit, on the one hand, as from a spirit of envy and malice, on the other.

The man who lies down, who will not try to walk, has become a mere cumberer of the earth’s surface.

But while every man needs at times to be lifted up when he stumbles, no man can afford to let himself be carried, and it is worth no man’s while to try thus to carry some one else.