Edmund Morris > Quotes

“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, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Yet there was no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified to be President of all the people. Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character. A random survey of his achievements might show him mastering German, French, and the contrasted dialects of Harvard and Dakota Territory; assembling fossil skeletons with paleontological skill; fighting for an amateur boxing championship; transcribing birdsong into a private system of phonetics; chasing boat thieves with a star on his breast and Tolstoy in his pocket; founding a finance club, a stockmen's association, and a hunting-conservation society; reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own; climbing the Matterhorn; promulgating a flying machine; and becoming a world authority on North American game mammals. If the sum of all these facets of experience added up to more than a geometric whole - implying excess construction somewhere, planes piling upon planes - then only he, presumably, could view the polygon entire.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“[Bram Stoker] wrote in his diary: "Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Norway...looked to Roosevelt "as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe....It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Theodore," [Theodore Sr] said, eschewing boyish nicknames, "you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“[Speaker Reed's] wit was brilliant and usually cruel... Asked to attend the funeral of a political enemy, he refused, "but that does not mean to say I do not heartily approve of it.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“[Theodore] Roosevelt had long ago discovered that the more provincial the supplicants, the less able were they to understand that their need was not unique: that he was not yearning to travel two thousand miles on bad trains to support the reelection campaign of a county sheriff, or to address the congregation of a new chapel in a landscape with no trees. His refusal, no matter how elaborately apologetic, was received more often in puzzlement than anger. Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, or practically any monarch or minister of consequence in Europe -- not to mention the maquettes in Rodin’s studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

From COLONEL ROOSEVELT, p. 104.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“Let’s ask him,” Lincoln Steffens suggested. The two men dashed across to headquarters and burst into Roosevelt’s office. Riis put the question directly. Was he working to be President? The effect, wrote Steffens, “was frightening.” TR leaped to his feet, ran around his desk, and fists clenched, teeth bared, he seemed about to throttle Riis, who cowered away, amazed. “Don’t you dare ask me that,” TR yelled at Riis. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—you—” Riis’s shocked face or TR’s recollection that he had few friends as devoted as Jake Riis halted him. He backed away, came up again to Riis, and put his arm over his shoulder. Then he beckoned me close and in an awed tone of voice explained. “Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of … But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to—” He stopped, held us off, and looked into our faces with his face screwed up into a knot, as with lowered voice he said slowly: “I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?” Again he looked at us as if we were enemies; then he threw us away from him and went back to his desk. “Go on away, now,” he said, “and don’t you ever mention the—don’t you ever mention that to me again.”141”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“To live, for him, has no meaning other than to drive oneself, to act with all one’s strength. An existence without stress, without struggle, without growth has always struck him as mindless. Those who remain on the sidelines he sees as cowards, and consequently his personal enemies.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“For once, he could look back at the past without regret, and at the future without bewilderment. Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: “I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“… I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity.”
― Edmund Morris, Beethoven: The Universal Composer

“He has,in short,reached his peak as a hunter,exuberantly altered from the pale,overweight statesman of ten months ago. Africa's way of reducing every problem of existence to dire alternatives-shoot or starve,kill or be killed,shelter or suffer,procreate or count for nothing-has clarified his thinking,purged him of politics and its constant search for compromise.”
― Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt

“Roosevelt gazed around the library. A glint in his spectacles betrayed displeasure. Loeb came up inquiringly, and there was a whispered conversation in which the words newspapermen and sufficient room were audible. Hurrying outside, Loeb returned with two dozen delighted scribes. They proceeded to report the subsequent ceremony with a wealth of detail unmatched in the history of presidential inaugurations.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“As if toughening himself for the crisis to come, Roosevelt intensified his latest exercise routine, "singlesticks." Every evening in the residence, he and Leonard Wood donned padded helmets and chest protectors and beat each other like carpets. "We look like Tweedledum and Tweedle dee," the President joked.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business.… No amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“One person who met him during these dark days was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. After watching Roosevelt in action at a literary dinner table, and afterward dispensing summary justice in the police courts, Stoker wrote in his diary: “Must be President some day. A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature. Lacking that, he also lost his foresight, and unwittingly depleted the inheritances of his children. “We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“Civil Service Commissioner William Dudley Foulke recorded his interview with Pat Garrett, slayer of Billy the Kid and candidate for Customs Collectorship of El Paso, Texas: ROOSEVELT How many men have you killed? GARRETT Three. ROOSEVELT How did you come to do it? GARRETT In the discharge of my duty as a public officer. ROOSEVELT (looking pleased) Have you ever played poker? GARRETT Yes. ROOSEVELT Are you going to do it when you are in office? GARRETT No. ROOSEVELT All right, I am going to appoint you. But see you observe the civil service law. The appointment dismayed many Texans, not because of Garrett’s bloody record but because he was an agnostic. “In El Paso,” the President said approvingly, “the people are homicidal but orthodox.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“If a man has a very decided character, has a strongly accentuated career, it is normally the case of course that he makes ardent friends and bitter enemies.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Then he launched into a classic statement of his political philosophy. I appreciate all you say about what Bryanism means, and I also … [am] as strongly opposed to populism in every stage as the greatest representative of corrupt wealth, but … these representatives … have themselves been responsible for a portion of the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant, and sometimes wicked revolt. I do not believe it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing, that, whereas the populists, socialists and others really do not correct the evils at all … the Republicans hold the just balance and set our faces as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other.66”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Corporate cunning has developed faster than the laws of nation and state,” he remarked to the reporter Lindsay Denison. “Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex