Theodore Roosevelt

The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.

Appraisals are where you get together with your team leader and agree what an outstanding member of the team you are, how much your contribution has been valued, what massive potential you have and, in recognition of all this, would you mind having your salary halved.

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

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

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

The American people abhor a vacuum.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.

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

Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

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.

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.