Theodore Rex Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I told him he must treat the political audience as one coming, not to see an etching, but a poster,” he said to Jusserand and Archie Butt. “He must, therefore, have streaks of blue, yellow, and red to catch the eye, and eliminate all fine lines and soft colors.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“ON FRIDAY, 25 August, Roosevelt shocked most of his countrymen by dropping to the floor of Long Island Sound in one of the Navy’s six new submarines, appropriately named the Plunger. He remained beneath the surface (lashed with heavy rain) long enough to watch fish swim past his window. Then, taking the controls, he essayed a few movements himself, including one which brought the ship to the surface rear end up.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“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

“Roosevelt was at his most impassioned when commented on the sadistic quality of lynchings: There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation...Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“The flood became an embarrassment for Roosevelt. Did all these men imagine they were buying him? “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

“A remarkable consensus of Democratic and Republican editorial writers held that Roosevelt would be as “conservative” as McKinley. The very unanimity of this opinion seemed contrived, as if to soothe a nervous stock market. The financial pages reported that “Severe Shocks,” “Feverish Trading,” and “Heavy Declines” had hit Wall Street on Friday, when the Gold Dollar President began to die. Roosevelt knew little about money—it was one of the few subjects that bored him—but even he could see that one false move this weekend might bring about a real panic on Monday.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“He had been a timid child in New York City, cut off from schoolboy society by illness, wealth, and private tutors. Inspired by a leonine father, he had labored with weights to build up his strength. Simultaneously, he had built up his courage “by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness.” With every ounce of new muscle, with every point scored over pugilistic, romantic, and political rivals, his personal impetus (likened by many observers to that of a steam train) had accelerated. Experiences had flashed by him in such number that he was obviously destined to travel a larger landscape of life than were his fellows. He had been a published author at eighteen, a husband at twenty-two, an acclaimed historian and New York State Assemblyman at twenty-three, a father and a widower at twenty-five, a ranchman at twenty-six, a candidate for Mayor of New York at twenty-seven, a husband again at twenty-eight, a Civil Service Commissioner of the United States at thirty. By then he was producing book after book, and child after child, and cultivating every scientist, politician, artist, and intellectual of repute in Washington. His career had gathered further speed: Police Commissioner of New York City at thirty-six, Assistant Secretary of the Navy at thirty-eight, Colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” at thirty-nine. At last, in Cuba, had come the consummating “crowded hour.” A rush, a roar, the sting of his own blood, a surge toward the sky, a smoking pistol in his hand, a soldier in light blue doubling up “neatly as a jackrabbit” … When the smoke cleared, he had found himself atop Kettle Hill on the Heights of San Juan, with a vanquished empire at his feet.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit on his arms and legs and hold him down and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin … is simply thrust into his jaws … and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose … until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious.… His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but who cannot drown.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“In El Paso,” the President said approvingly, “the people are homicidal but orthodox.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“Every purseproud individual, as well as reactionary dullard, always considers a great character insane. In their littleness of heart, of soul, he seems so to them; but the people know that Frederick the Great was not insane, although he was called so all over Europe, just as well as they know and understand Theodore Roosevelt.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“the Man with the Muckrake, the man who could look no way but downward with muckrake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor. Roosevelt’s subsequent remarks about “a certain magazine” that he had just read “with great indignation” could not be reported, due to the Gridiron’s tradition of confidentiality. He spoke for nearly three quarters of an hour over a white, twelve-foot model of the Capitol, glowing with internal lights. According to one member of the audience, he “sizzled” with moral disdain. Since his listeners represented all of official Washington, and since The Cosmopolitan had just published another installment of “The Treason of the Senate,” it was not long before the Man with the Muckrake was identified as David Graham Phillips. Nor was it long before the Man became plural—denoting all writers of Phillips’s type—and the noun a verb, as in muckrakers, muckraking, to muckrake. A new buzzword was born. Ray Stannard Baker reacted to it as if stung. Opprobrium cast on all investigative journalists, he wrote Roosevelt, might discourage the honest ones, leaving the field to “outright ranters and inciters.” Roosevelt’s reply indicated a determination to give the Gridiron speech again, in some more public forum. “People so persistently misunderstand what I said that I want to have it reported in full.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“What bothered him particularly about the current series was that its publisher, William Randolph Hearst, was a member of Congress. Here was an elected representative of the people using the fourth estate to malign and manipulate his colleagues, probably with intent to destabilize. “I need hardly tell you what I feel about Hearst,” the President wrote to the Attorney General of New York State, “and about the papers and magazines he controls and their influence for evil upon the social life of this country.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“ROOSEVELT READ THE Depew/Platt profile in The Cosmopolitan and began to wonder if the literature of exposure was not becoming a destructive force. He approved of public attacks on corruption and fraud, but not this kind of “hysteria and sensationalism.” The double tendency of subjective journalism, he felt, was toward “suppression of truth” and “assertion or implication of the false.”
― 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. Normally the man of great productive capacity who becomes rich by guiding the labor of many other men does so by enabling them to produce more than they could produce without his guidance; and both he and they share in the benefit, which comes also to the public at large. The superficial fact that the sharing may be unequal must never blind us to the underlying fact that there is this sharing, and that the benefit comes in some degree to each man concerned.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“As Hay reminded Roosevelt, “dealing with people to whom mendacity is a science is no easy thing.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“THE DIFFICULTY OF MOUNTING a serious challenge to Theodore Roosevelt’s candidacy in 1904 became apparent when the Prohibition Party gave its backing to a man named Silas Swallow. To the regret of satirists and cartoonists, Mr. Swallow was unable to choose Ezra Tipple, the General Secretary of the Methodist Conference, as his running mate. Tipple was a Roosevelt supporter.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex

“HIS EXCELLENCY Arturo Paul Nicolas, Count de Cassini and Marquis de Capizzucchi de Bologna, Russian Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States, told Roosevelt that some four hundred anti-Semitic rioters had been arrested in Kishinev, and the local governor dismissed for failing to prevent the pogrom. Hay cautioned that Cassini could not be trusted. For all his Italian nomenclature, he was as Russian as borscht, and lied with fabled virtuosity. The Ambassador, who mysteriously depended on his teenage daughter, Marguerite, for social purposes, introduced her around town as “Princess Cassini,” when she was neither a princess nor, according to rumor, a Cassini. His numberless jeweled decorations may not all have been earned in the Tsar’s service, but they were the glittering envy of Embassy Row. When he stood under a chandelier at receptions, he looked like a section of the Milky Way.”
― Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex