Theodore Roosevelt

We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us it is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out

The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything. Do not be afraid to make mistakes providing you do not make the same one twice.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

Theodore Roosevelt, impatient with the excesses of "purely sentimental historians," authored his own stirring vindication of America's relations with the Indians: Looked at from the standpoint of the ultimate result, there was little real difference to the Indian whether the land was taken by treaty or by war. . . . No treaty could be satisfactory to the whites, no treaty served the needs of humanity and civilization, unless it gave the land to the Americans as unreservedly as any successful war. Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conflict, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is, indeed, a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. . . . It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of to-day. The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. . . . It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

Do what you can - with what you have - where you are.

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.

There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 per cent. Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.

I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.