Great Throughts Treasury

"I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning, which, I think, is hardly necessary in Kansas. When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit. And you men of the Grand Army, you want justice for the brave man who fought, and punishment for the coward who shirked his work. Is that not so?" - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"If I must choose between righteousness and peace, I choose righteousness." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public-service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business. I do not wish to see the nation forced into the ownership of the railways if it can possibly be avoided, and the only alternative is thoroughgoing and effective legislation, which shall be based on a full knowledge of all the facts, including a physical valuation of property. This physical valuation is not needed, or, at least, is very rarely needed, for fixing rates; but it is needed as the basis of honest capitalization." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"No foreign policy-no matter how ingenious-has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of few and carried in the hearts of many." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Obedience of the law is demanded; not asked as a favor." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Our loyalty is due entirely to the United States. It is due to the President only and exactly to the degree in which he efficiently serves the United States. It is our duty to support him when he serves the United States well. It is our duty to oppose him when he serves it badly. This is true about Mr. Wilson now and it has been true about all our Presidents in the past. It is our duty at all times to tell the truth about the President and about every one else, save in the cases where to tell the truth at the moment would benefit the public enemy." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests, which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Surely such a union of indomitable resolution in the achievement of a given purpose, with patience and moderation in the policy pursued, and with kindly charity and consideration and friendliness to those of opposite belief, marks the very spirit in which we of to-day should approach the pressing problems of the present. These problems have to do .with securing a more just and generally wide spread welfare, so that there may be a more substantial measure of equality in moral and physical well-being among the people [...]." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The boy who is going to make a great man must not make up his mind merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem, it will avail us little to solve all others." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The highest form of success... comes... to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The men and women who have the right ideals... are those who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"War is not merely justifiable, but imperative upon honorable men, upon an honorable nation, where peace can only be obtained by the sacrifice of conscientious conviction or of national welfare." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"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." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we are to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of all, the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family life, the fundamental and essential qualities—the homely, every-day, all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy children, then the state will topple, will go down, no matter what may be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be that power of organization, that power of working in common for a common end [...]. Moreover, the things of the spirit are even more important than the things of the body. We can well do without the hard intolerance and arid intellectual barrenness of what was worst in the theological systems of the past, but there has never been greater need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the present time. So, while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions of modern philosophy in its various branches, it would be worse than folly on our part to ignore our need of intellectual leadership… our debt to scientific men is incalculable, and our civilization of to-day would have reft from it all that which most highly distinguishes it if the work of the great masters of science during the past four centuries were now undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, humanitarianism, seen such development as now; and though we must all beware of the folly, and the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks the believer in the perfectibility of man when his heart runs away with his head, or when vanity usurps the place of conscience, yet we must remember also that it is only by working along the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind, that we can be sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of well-being than was ever attained by any preceding civilization." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"While ever careful to refrain from wrongdoing others, we must be no less insistent that we are not wronged ourselves. We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right and not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts manfully and justly should ever have cause to fear us, and no strong power should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent aggression." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"You ask that Mr. Taft shall let the world know what his religious belief is. This is purely his own private concern; it is a matter between him and his Maker, a matter for his own conscience; and to require it to be made public under penalty of political discrimination is to negative the first principles of our Government, which guarantee complete religious liberty, and the right to each to act in religious affairs as his own conscience dictates. Mr. Taft never asked my advice in the matter, but if he had asked it, I should have emphatically advised him against thus stating publicly his religious belief. The demand for a statement of a candidate’s religious belief can have no meaning except that there may be discrimination for or against him because of that belief. Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths. The inevitable result of entering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful conditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The more any man is in the contemplation of truth, the more fairer and firmer impression is made upon his heart by truth." - Thomas Brooks

"A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted upon him." - Thomas Carlyle

"The excessive regard of parents for their children, and their dislike of other people's is, like class feeling, patriotism, save-your-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom." - Thomas Hardy

"What do you think of it, Moon, As you go? Is life much or no?' 'O, I think of it, often think of it As a show God ought surely to shut up soon, As I go." - Thomas Hardy

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever." - Thomas Jefferson

"If the question [before justices of the peace] relate to any point of public liberty, or if it be one of those in which the judges may be suspected of bias, the jury undertake to decide both law and fact." - Thomas Jefferson

"It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead." - Thomas Jefferson

"That peace, safety, and concord may be the portion of our native land, and be long enjoyed by our fellow-citizens, is the most ardent wish of my heart, and if I can be instrumental in procuring or preserving them, I shall think I have not lived in vain." - Thomas Jefferson

"We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it." - Thomas Jefferson

"You ask if I mean to publish anything on the subject of a letter of mine to my friend Charles Thompson? Certainly not. I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that arena, I should only add an unit to the number of Bedlamites." - Thomas Jefferson

"Our knowledge of God is paradoxically not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us. It is in proportion, as we are known to him that we find our real being. We know him in and through ourselves in so far as his truth is the source of our being and his merciful love is the very heart of our life and existence." - Thomas Merton

"The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier attitude toward death that has always puzzled me. My impression is that...most of the defenders of these weapons are not suitably horrified at the possibility of a war in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed...I suspect that an important factor may be belief in an afterlife, and that the proportion of those who think that death is not the end is much higher among the partisans of the bomb than among its opponents." - Thomas Nagel

"As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, is regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature's God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them. God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon. But infidelity by ascribing every phenomenon to properties of matter, conceives a system for which it cannot account, and yet it pretends to demonstration. It reasons from what it sees on the surface of the earth, but it does not carry itself on the solar system existing by motion. It sees upon the surface a perpetual decomposition and recomposition of matter. It sees that an oak produces an acorn, an acorn an oak, a bird an egg, an egg a bird, and so on. In things of this kind it sees something which it calls a natural cause, but none of the causes it sees is the cause of that motion which preserves the solar system." - Thomas Paine

"I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense." - Thomas Paine

"It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive, that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet that they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent." - Thomas Paine

"There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words." - Thomas Reid

"America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a non-corrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products. " - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"We explain the fact that the Milky Way is there by the doctrine of creation, but how do we explain the fact that the Bhagavad Gita is there?" - Wilfred Cantwell Smith

"isit every member twice a year: One fellow minister commented that this would be possible with a 200 member congregation, but would become harder with a larger congregation. I remember reading that for every 175-225 members there should be a minister — something some churches exceed while others fall short. Nevertheless, the point is to have an acquaintance with one’s congregation. A personal visit may be perceived as a “clerical duty” in today’s world, but another minister suggested having members over to your home (e.g., preacher, elder, deacon) for a meal to meet these ends." - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry

"If a thing loves, it is infinite." - William Blake

"The whore and gambler, by the state licensed, build the nation's fate." - William Blake

"Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone to rev'rence what is ancient, and can plead a course of long observance for its use, that even servitude, the worst of ills, because deliver'd down from sire to son, is kept and guarded as a sacred thing!" - William Cowper

"But, ah me! Where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?" - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Borrowing money on what's called 'easy terms,' is a one-way ticket to the Poor House. If you think it ain't a Sucker Game, why is your Banker the richest man in your Town? Why is your Bank the biggest and finest building in your Town? Instead of passing Bills to make borrowing easy, if Congress had passed a Bill that no Person could borrow a cent of Money from any other person, they would have gone down in History as committing the greatest bit of Legislation in the World." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Here's another way of putting it. Roosevelt wants recovery to start at the bottom. In other words, by a system of high taxes, he wants business to help the little fellow to get started and get some work, and then pay business back by buying things when he's at work. Business says, 'Let everybody alone. Let business alone, and quit monkeying with us, and we'll get everything going for you, and if we prosper, naturally the worker will prosper. That's exactly what business says, and they're justified from their angle in saying that." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers