Colonel Roosevelt Quotes

“Norway...looked to Roosevelt "as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe....It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“[Theodore] Roosevelt had long ago discovered that the more provincial the supplicants, the less able were they to understand that their need was not unique: that he was not yearning to travel two thousand miles on bad trains to support the reelection campaign of a county sheriff, or to address the congregation of a new chapel in a landscape with no trees. His refusal, no matter how elaborately apologetic, was received more often in puzzlement than anger. Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, or practically any monarch or minister of consequence in Europe -- not to mention the maquettes in Rodin’s studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

From COLONEL ROOSEVELT, p. 104.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“He has,in short,reached his peak as a hunter,exuberantly altered from the pale,overweight statesman of ten months ago. Africa's way of reducing every problem of existence to dire alternatives-shoot or starve,kill or be killed,shelter or suffer,procreate or count for nothing-has clarified his thinking,purged him of politics and its constant search for compromise.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“It is true, as the champions of the extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Conservatives, he said, “are taught to believe that change means destruction. They are wrong.… Life means change; where there is no change, death comes.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Roosevelt followed it8 with a quirky essay in The Outlook entitled “Dante and the Bowery,” arguing that literary stylists had grown too precious in eschewing contemporary imagery. There was as much epic grandeur and poignant example to be found in modern life, he suggested, as there was in Greek myth, or for that matter, thirteenth-century cosmology.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“BECAUSE ROOSEVELT WAS9, in the image of Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia University, “polygonal,” visitors saw only certain facets of his personality at any given time.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Washburn noticed how courteous the Colonel was to servants, and how he talked with equal animation about his gardener and the King of Italy.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Of all broken reeds,” Roosevelt declared, “sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Thanks to herculean skinning and salting by Heller and Mearns, he can congratulate himself on having shipped, via the railway to Mombasa, “a collection of large animals such as has never been obtained for any other museum in the world on a single trip.” The”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“ROOSEVELT’S SUDDEN INTEREST in modern art, on a day when he could have stayed home and read accounts of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, caused much editorial hilarity. A cartoon by Kemble90 in the Baltimore Evening Sun showed the new President contemplating a portrait of his toothy predecessor in the Oval Office and musing, “I wonder if that’s a futurist? It can’t be a cubist.” The New York World argued that the “Square Deal”91 of 1903 had been a proto-Cubist conceit, doing to the Constitution what Braque and Picasso would do to color and form ten years later.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Ensconced, he (Roosevelt) lacked some of the neuroses of progressives-economic envy and race hatred especially.His radicalism was a matter of energy rather than urgency.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Except for the two years he had lived with cowboys in North Dakota,and being the employer of a dozen or so servants,Roosevelt had never had to suffer any prolonged intimacy with the working class.From infancy,he had enjoyed the perquisites of money and social position.The money,through his own mismanagement,had often run short,and he was by no means wealthy even now, but he had always taken exclusivity for granted.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“During the last three years and a half, hundreds of American men, women, and children have been murdered on the high seas and in Mexico. Mr. Wilson has not dared to stand up for them...He wrote Germany that he would hold her to "strict accountability" if an American lost his life on an American or neutral ship by her submarine warfare. Forthwith the Arabic and the Gulflight were sunk. But Mr. Wilson dared not take any action...Germany despised him; and the Lusitania was sunk in consequence. Thirteen hundred and ninety-four people were drowned, one hundred and three of them babies under two years of age. Two days later, when the dead mothers with their dead babies in their arms lay by the scores in the Queenstown morgue, Mr. Wilson selected the moment as opportune to utter his famous sentence about being "too proud to fight."

Roosevelt threw his speech script to the floor and continued in near absolute silence.

Mr Wilson now dwells at Shadow Lawn. There should be shadows enough at Shadow Lawn: the shadows of men, women, and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands; the shadows of the helpless who Mr. Wilson did not dare protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves; the shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits; the shadows of troopers who lay in the Mexican desert, the black blood crusted round their mouths, and their dim eyes looking upward, because President Wilson had sent them to do a task, and then shamefully abandoned them to the mercy of foes who knew no mercy.
Those are the shadows proper for Shadow Lawn: the shadows of deeds that were never done; the shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action; the shadows of the tortured dead.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Immersion in no way affected Roosevelt's cheerful volubility. "I never saw a man who talked so much," Rondon marveled. "I used to love to watch him think...for he always gesticulated. He would be alone, not saying a word, yet his hands would be moving, and he would be waving his arms and nodding his head with the greatest determination, as though arguing with somebody else.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe--not to mention the maquettes in Rodin's studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that a devil masters each of us .... It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“LOOK NOW, IN YOUR IGNORANCE, ON THE FACE OF DEATH.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Everyone knew that the RNC had decided to field a losing candidate in November, rather than gamble on one who would radicalize its traditional platform.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“To be neutral13 between right and wrong is to serve wrong.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“When a judge decides a constitutional question, when he decides what the people as a whole can and cannot do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think that it is wrong. We should hold the judiciary in all respect, but it is both absurd and degrading to make a fetish of a judge or of any one else.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“A poet,” he liked to say, “can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Carnegie, disgusted, fave up all faith that the Colonel would serve as his personal peace envoy at Potsdam. "There's a trace of the savage," he wrote, "in that original compound.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Time will have his little scar, But the wound won’t last.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“He is a great big boy," Wilson said. "There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can't resist the man. I can easily understand why his followers are so fond of him.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Once more his hasty step and high-pitched laughter were heard down the corridors of Metropolitan magazine. He cheerfully tolerated8 the left-wing views of his younger colleagues, including Israel Zangwill, Sonya Levien, George Bellows, and John Reed, who professed admiration for the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. “Villa,” Roosevelt said9, “is a murderer and a rapist.” Reed tried to provoke him. “What’s wrong with that? I believe in rape.” But Roosevelt only grinned. “I’m glad to find a young man who believes in something.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“It is not22 a good thing for a country to have a professional yodeler, a human trombone like Mr. Bryan as secretary of state, nor a college president with an astute and shifty mind, a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people … and no real knowledge or wisdom concerning internal and international affairs as head of the nation.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“I think that the love of the really happy husband and wife—not purged of passion, but with passion heated to a white heat of intensity and purity and tenderness and consideration, and with many another feeling added thereto—is the loftiest and most ennobling influence that comes into the life of any man or woman, even loftier and more ennobling than the wise and tender love for children.” In”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“If he was less motivated by compassion than anger at what he saw as the arrogance of capital,he chafed,nonetheless,to regulate it.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt