Theodore Roosevelt

“ Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty deeds we make them come true. We cannot afford to develop any one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others, equally necessary, atrophied. ”

“ As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit. The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. ”

“ If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues ”

“ I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. ”

“ Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life; but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong. ”

“ Remember always that the securing of a substantial education, whether by the individual or by a people, is attained only by a process, not by an act. You can no more make a man really educated by giving him a certain curriculum of studies than you can make a people fit for self-government by giving it a paper constitution. The training of an individual so as to fit him to do good work in the world is a matter of years; just as the training of a nation to fit it successfully to fulfil the duties of self-government is a matter, not of a decade or two, but of generations. ”

“ My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. ”

“ The deeds and works of any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating or applying Socialism, there is no movement of note which can take place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before. ”

“ To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of the great nations of Middle and Western Europe; which has inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. ”

“ The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He can do, and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. ”

“ To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours—an effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good and for evil. ”

“ In the end, the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one type perishes with it, while the other leaves its mark deep on the history of all the future of mankind.
A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though in the physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly influence the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what it has done. ”

“ But the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common-sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. ”

“ The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. ”

“ On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the great Empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that have also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the empire she won between the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, had at the same time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath, the Egypt of Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and Macedon in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. ”

“ We Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty, of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think me a very radical democrat—as, for the matter of that, I am—and my theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist. ”

“ You, my hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and do each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage be a citizen of the world at large. ”

“ I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. ”

“ That is the kind of Christianity that counts in a public official, that counts in the military official—the Christianity that makes him do his duty in war, or makes him do his duty in peace. And you—who I hope will be the great majority—who are not in Government service, can conduct yourselves so that your neighbors shall have every respect for your courage, your honesty, your good faith, shall have implicit trust that you will deal religiously with your brother as man to man, whether it be in business or whether it be in connection with your relations to the community as a whole. ”

“ When the Roman Empire that was really Roman went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work throughout Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism. ”

“ When the Greek lost the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman. ”

“ Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must be, "Yes," whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war; just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong. ”

“ On the contrary, just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful to see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong him. ”

“ Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character—the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man's force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. ”

“ This was the most famous university of mediæval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, plowmen, woodchoppers, and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare ”

“ The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or of a very few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nation may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the average citizen ”

“ You belong to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying on a scale hitherto unexampled to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great Power. ”

“ That is why I decline to recognize the mere multi-millionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him of real benefit, of real use,—and such is often the case,—why, then he does become an asset of worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. ”