The Bully Pulpit Quotes

“It is surprising,” Roosevelt explained, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“My reading was always a kind of living,” he explained later, “a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“I have always been fond of the West African proverb: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,’ ”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“To find the best authors,” he boasted, “is like being able to tell good wine without the labels.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life,” Edith later wrote, “and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“(Taft's mother's) losing her firstborn had convinced her that children are treasures lent not given and that they may be recalled at any time. Parents, she firmly believed, could never love their children too much.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“It seemed as though Theodore's passion for Alice far exceeded his genuine knowledge of her.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“As soon as (Teddy Roosevelt) received an assignment for a paper or project, he would set to work, never leaving anything to the last minute. Prepared so far ahead "freed his mind" from worry and facilitated fresh, lucid thought.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“But the same “personal charm” that had propelled Taft to the presidency ultimately proved “dangerous” to him, Baker concluded. For far too long, his amiable nature had kept him from the rough-and-tumble of politics, from the need to fight for himself and his convictions. Had he come into the White House”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“I trust you will have the grace to go and hang yourself rather than attempt to belittle a nation by running for the presidency,”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“I thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform. Because senators at the time were elected by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, the majority of senators owed their positions to their state machines. These organizations, William Allen White observed, were in thrall to the business interests that filled their coffers through campaign contributions or blatant bribery. In a number of states, the bosses made themselves senators; in others, wealthy individuals purchased their seats”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State . . . and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master, instead of servant.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty,” Henry Demarest Lloyd”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“Roosevelt declared, arguing that “the insistence upon having only the perfect cure often results in securing no betterment whatever.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation." -Teddy Roosevelt”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“That was my first lesson in real politics. . . . If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“As S. S. McClure well understood, the “vitality of democracy” depends on “popular knowledge of complex questions.” At”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words. I'm afraid it's too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell." Theodore Roosevelt, writing in naval history in his spare time while in law school”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“There is no one left,” McClure exhorted his readers as he cast about for a remedy to America’s woes at the turn of the twentieth century, “none but all of us.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“She was never satisfied with anything less than perfection, but she was no grind. She was too interested in people.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

“Theodore Roosevelt's father wrote him, "I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism