Theodore Quotes

“For refusing to collapse into an earth-devouring black hole under the force of its own staggering density, we dedicate this book to Theodore Roosevelt's left testicle.”

— Cracked.com

“Quanah Parker. As the years went by he became a shrewd businessman, built a large house, and successfully managed his farm and ranch. He traveled all over the country, and went to Washington to ride in President Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade.”

— Dee Brown

“Johnny Flora Author of "The Spell of Zalanon and Wake Co."
Quote Du Jour; Fare better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that neither knows victory or defeat ... Theodore Roosevelt”

— Johnny Flora

“In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors ... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”

— Edmund Morris

“What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice. -THEODORE ROOSEVELT”

— Ryan Holiday

“Theodore had an apparently inexhaustible fund of knowledge about everything, but he imparted this knowledge with a sort of meticulous diffidence that made you feel he was not so much teaching you something new, as reminding you of something which you were already aware of, but which had, for some reason or other, slipped your mind.”

— Gerald Durrell

“Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt's eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven't time to read.”

— David McCullough

“Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.”

— Margaret MacMillan

“Theodore, I don't think I have to tell you but ... "
"I won't mention the little incident, your grace. Not even on my deathbed."
"Thank you, but to be safe you should give me your solemn oath."
Theodore repeated his promise with his hand on his heart.
"Ah, we have to do his sort of thing correctly. Fetch me a holy book.”

— Anya Wylde

“I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I'd feel compelled to organise the books in some regimented system - Dewey or alphabetical or worse - and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent.
Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser's case I think I was focused mainly on his name): George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was Vanity Fair, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copperfield, she might seduce him).”

— Rebecca Makkai

“You ... you loved her, didn't you, Pa?"
Theodore sighed, and kept staring at the horses' rumps.
"Oh, I loved her, all right," he answered. "A man sometimes can't help lovin' a woman, even if she's the wrong one.”

— LaVyrle Spencer

“A man who will steal for me will steal from me. Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal.”

— David McCullough

“The government is us; WE are the government, you and I.- Theodore Roosevelt”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“Theodore Finch, April 3. Today is your day. You're off to Great Places! You're off and away!”

— Jennifer Niven

“Theodore Finch leans against an SUV, hands in pockets, like he has all the time in the world and he expects me. I think of the Virginia Woolf lines, the ones from The Waves: Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here.”

— Jennifer Niven

“It may be that the voice of the people is the voice of God 51 times out of 100. But the remaining 49 times, it is the voice of the devil, or worse, the voice of a fool. Theodore Roosevelt”

— H.W. Brands

“Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life, I find.
[Quoted by Theodore Sorensen in 'Kennedy']”

— John F. Kennedy

“Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger's device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories - for example, learning to play scales - then translates them into digital signals.”

— Steven Kotler

“A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.”

— Russell Baker

“Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.”

— Krist Novoselic

“I liked the name Frederick Bickel and I wish now I had left it as it was. After all, Theodore Bikel, whose name was similar though spelled differently, didn't change his, and he did all right.”

— Fredric March

“Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren't Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?),”

— Howard Zinn

“But I had two very special people who helped to take my style to the next level. Thank God for my first MC Cowboy and my first student Grand Wizard Theodore, and to go out after creating this art form and finding everyone jamming to it - that too was pretty scary.”

— Grandmaster Flash

“It is hard to realize today that "government" during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln's Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not "executives" and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt's time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.”

— Peter F. Drucker

“If you will it, it is no dream.'" "I like that ... Who said it?" "Theodore Herzl.”

— Zack Love

“George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all rode their wartime heroics into the White House.”

— Jeff Greenfield

“When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.”

— Candice Millard

“I am a Republican. I'm loyal to the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. And I believe that my party, in some ways, has strayed from those principles, particularly on the issue of fiscal discipline.”

— John McCain

“Never will I sit motionless while directly or indirectly apology is made for the murder of the helpless. In securing any kind ofpeace, the first essential is to guarantee to every man the most elementary of rights: the right to his own life. Murder is not debatable.
-Theodore Roosevelt”

— R.C. Sproul

“If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.”

— Jeff Greenfield

“Theodore Roosevelt had drawn public attention to his attractive family in order to create a bond with ordinary Americans. Eleanor Roosevelt had successfully broached the idea that a First Lady could be nearly as much a public figure as her husband.”

— Robert Dallek

“For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser.”

— Dorothy Parker

“Theodore Beza was a younger colleague and successor of John Calvin, the founder of the Reformed branch of Protestantism during the Reformation. In his biography of Calvin, Beza recalled the three great preachers in Geneva during those years-Calvin himself, Guillaume Farel, and Pierre Viret. Farel, said Beza, was the most fiery, passionate, and forceful in his sermonic delivery. Viret was the most eloquent, and audiences hung on his skillful and beautiful words. The time flew by fastest when sitting under his preaching. Calvin was the most profound, his sermons packed full of "the weightiest of insights." Calvin had the most substance, Viret the most eloquence, and Farel the most vehemence. Beza concluded "that a preacher who was a composite of these three men would have been absolutely perfect.”

— Timothy Keller

“Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.”

— Terry Teachout

“Surely you're joking Theodore?' he protested. 'You mean to say that each snail is both a male and a female?'
'Yes indeed,' said Theodore, adding with masterly understatement, 'it's very curious.'
'Good God,' cried Larry. 'I think it's unfair. All those damned slimy things wandering about seducing each other like mad all over the bushes, and having the pleasures of both sensations. Why couldn't such a gift be given to the human race? That's what I want to know.”

— Gerald Durrell

“As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

“(Theodore) Roosevelt considered his experience with 'fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier' to be 'the most educational asset' of his entire life, instrumental to his success in becoming president.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

“Arabella tilted her head, and Theodore couldn't help himself. Her lips were right in front of him, and he needed to claim them. He settled his lips over hers and the world melted away.”

— Jen Turano

“My name, as you may have guessed, is Theodore. I come from a strange stock. The members of my family were mostly epileptics, vegetarians, stutterers, triplets, nailbiters. But we've always been happy.”

— Brother Theodore

“At bottom, the court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

— John Paul Stevens

“For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.”

— Julia Alvarez

“Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.”

— Kenneth Minogue

“What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.”

— Dorothy Parker

“There are, occasionally, writers who are able to combine both story and style. They are, of course, the best. You get a spectacular view and you also get to look at it from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In the field of fantasy, those writers able to combine story-as-narration with story-as-style are even rarer. But there are a few ... the late Theodore Sturgeon, the early Ray Bradbury ... and Richard Christian Matheson. A brilliant chip off the old block.”

— Stephen King

“[Theodore Roosevelt] was a naturalist on the broadest grounds, uniting much technical knowledge with knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wild life. He probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who had preceded him, and, I think one is safe in saying, more human history also.”

— John Burroughs

“Who would have ever heard of Theodore Roosevelt outside of his immediate community if he had only half committed himself? The great secret of his career was that he has flung his whole life with all the determination and energy he could muster.”

— Orison Swett Marden

“[The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.”

— Thomas Frank

“Hat whole phrase, "daring greatly," is from the Theodore Roosevelt quote that goes back to your original question of, what about the critics? And when I read his quote it was life-changing. "It's not the critic who counts; it's not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done the better.”

— Brené Brown

“Theodore Roosevelt was always getting himself in hot water by talking before he had to commit himself upon issues not well-defined.”

— Calvin Coolidge

“When Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, he confessed that if he could be right 75 percent of the time, he would reach the highest measure of his expectation ... If that was the highest rating that one of the most distinguished men of the twentieth century could hope to obtain, what about you and me?”

— Dale Carnegie