Edmund Morris Quotes
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I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities he appears.
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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.
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Actually Roosevelt was identifying with Euripides—like himself, an upper-class celebrant of middle-class virtues.
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A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.
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...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
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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.
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The reason that he knew so much about everything, I found, was that wherever he went he got right in with the people.
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The most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.
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All things come to him who hustles while he waits.
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Do not all these things interest you? Isn’t it a fine thing to be alive when so many great things are happening?
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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.
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We had no longing for excessive wealth: a mere competency, though earned by daily toil, so that it was reasonably sure, and free from the drag of continued indebtedness to others, was all we coveted.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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History admires the wise, but elevates the brave.
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An autocrat’s a ruler that does what th’ people wants an’ takes th’ blame f’r it.
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Most of the members are positively corrupt, and the others are really singularly incompetent.
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There are floods of praise coming in as well as criticism.
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For once, he could look back at the past without regret, and at the future without bewilderment. Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: “I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them."
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We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.
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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.
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Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.
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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.