Wisdom of Theodore Roosevelt

Within the past two years I have read a history of Theodore Roosevelt and most recently an interesting old book titled Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters To His Children.

Consistent with my appreciation for the ‘giants’ in my life, my weblog for today credits a man, certainly more liberal than me, but nevertheless a wise man and a great president of this country.

On September 14, 1901 at age 42, Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th President of the United States, the youngest man ever to become President (John F. Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to that office at the age of 43). Mr. Roosevelt was the father of six children.

Following are some quotations from his service to country and family:

"I put myself in the way of things happening; and they happened."..."During the three years' service in the Legislature [he was elected to the New York state Legislature at age 23] I worked on a very simple philosophy of government. It was that personal character and initiative are the prime requisites in political and social life."

"A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals in so far as he can. My power for good, whatever it may be, would be gone if I didn't try to live up to the doctrines I have to preach."

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." (From his speech, "Man in the Arena")

" The kind of 'neutrality' which seeks to preserve 'peace' by timidly refusing to live up to our plighted word and to denounce and take action against such wrong as that committed in the case of Belgium, is unworthy of an honorable and powerful people. Dante reserved a special place of infamy in the Inferno for those base angels who dared side neither with evil or with good. Peace is ardently to be desired, but only as the handmaiden of righteousness. There can be no such peace until well-behaved, highly civilized small nations are protected from oppression and subjugation."

"It is no use to preach to [children] if you do not act decently yourself."

"For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison."

"The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name." "It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."

“Any nation [or person] which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life."
("Arbor Day" - A Message to the School-Children of the United States" April 15, 1907)

“The 'greatest good for the greatest number' applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations.”

"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it." "Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor."
(Third Annual Message to Congress, December 7, 1903)

"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility."