Edmund Morris Quotes
-
It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions.
-
Roosevelt was at his most impassioned when commented on the sadistic quality of lynchings: There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation...Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.
-
Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.
-
In 1902, the Senator had been banned from the White House for punching out a colleague, mid-debate.
-
A stocky figure in a frock coat sprang up the front steps of the White House.
-
Roosevelt gazed around the library. A glint in his spectacles betrayed displeasure. Loeb came up inquiringly, and there was a whispered conversation in which the words newspapermen and sufficient room were audible. Hurrying outside, Loeb returned with two dozen delighted scribes. They proceeded to report the subsequent ceremony with a wealth of detail unmatched in the history of presidential inaugurations.
-
As he waved at grizzled old Southerners, and they in turn waved the Stars and Stripes back at him, Roosevelt reflected that only thirty-three years before these men had been enemies of the Union. It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home. But what future war would heal the scars of this one?
-
Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.
-
I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities he appears.
-
In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others.
-
A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.
-
All things come to him who hustles while he waits.
-
Most of the members are positively corrupt, and the others are really singularly incompetent.
-
The most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.
-
There are floods of praise coming in as well as criticism.
-
We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.
-
Three cheers for Mr. and Mrs. Bower and their really satisfactory American family of twelve children!
-
… I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.
-
An autocrat’s a ruler that does what th’ people wants an’ takes th’ blame f’r it.
-
Do not all these things interest you? Isn’t it a fine thing to be alive when so many great things are happening?
-
There goes the most remarkable man I ever met. Unless I am badly mistaken, the world is due to hear from him one of these days.
-
Members of the White House Gang admit to “queer sensations” at the sight of this great barrel bearing down upon them, and half expect it to burst out of the Presidential shirt.
-
Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity.
-
...The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy's mind. What he thinks he says at once, says aloud. It is his distinguishing characteristic, and I don't know as he will ever outgrow it. But with it he has great qualities which make him an invaluable public servant--inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness, and devotion to good government which amounts to religion. We must let him work his way, for nobody can induce him to change it