Theodore Roosevelt

“The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.”

“Believe you can and you're halfway there.”

“Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.”

“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.”

“Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage.”

“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

“The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.”

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

“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.”

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

“A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”

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

“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.”

“The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.”

“It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.”

“A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.”

“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

“A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.”

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”

“The government is us we are the government, you and I.”

“Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.”

“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.”

“No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.”