Theodore Roosevelt Politics Quotations

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.

The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.

There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.

What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation can do, but what he or it actually does.

Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology.

We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism.

It is, of course, the merest truism to say a party is of use only so far as it serves the nation.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk; we must act big.