The Rough Riders Quotes

“It was a pleasure to deal with a man of high ideals, who scorned everything mean and base, and who possessed those robust and hardy qualities of body and mind, for the lack of which no merely negative virtue can ever atone.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“Credit should go with the performance of duty, and not with what is very often the accident of glory.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“Then there was Micah Jenkins, the Captain of Troop K, a gentle and courteous South Carolinian, on whom danger acted like wine. In action he was a perfect gamecock.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“Again, it was proposed that we should go up the mountains and make our camps there.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“Most of the men had simple souls. They could relate facts, but they said very little about what they dimly felt.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“We did everything possible to keep up the spirits of the men, but it was exceedingly difficult because there was nothing for them to do.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“I ended my statement to the colored soldiers by saying: "Now, I shall be very sorry to hurt you, and you don't know whether or not I will keep my word, but my men can tell you that I always do;" whereupon my cow-punchers, hunters, and miners solemnly nodded their heads and commented in chorus, exactly as if in a comic opera, "He always does; he always does!”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“Of course, really, those that stayed were entitled to precisely as much honor as those that went.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“defence;”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“On this day they showed themselves to be brave foes, worthy of honor for their gallantry.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“The colored cavalry-men had already so accepted me; in return, the Rough Riders, although for the most part Southwesterners, who have a strong color prejudice, grew to accept them with hearty good-will as comrades, and were entirely willing, in their own phrase, "to drink out of the same canteen." Where all the regular officers did so well, it is hard to draw any distinction; but in the cavalry division a peculiar meed of praise should be given to the officers of the Ninth and Tenth for their work, and under their leadership the colored troops did as well as any soldiers could possibly do. In”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“As they turned to run I closed in and fired twice, missing the first and killing the second. My revolver was from the sunken battle-ship Maine, and had been given me by my brother-in-law, Captain W. S. Cowles, of the Navy.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“owing to the lack of attendance and supplies in the field-hospitals with the army.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“The sides of the hills in front were bare; but the country up to them was, for the most part, covered with such dense jungle that in charging through it no accuracy of formation could possibly be preserved.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“As I passed by a couple of tall, lank, Oklahoma cow-punchers, I heard one say, "Well, some of the boys got it in the neck!" to which the other answered with the grim plains proverb of the South: "Many a good horse dies.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“The newspaper press failed to do full justice to the white regulars, in my opinion, from the simple reason that everybody knew that they would fight, whereas there had been a good deal of question as to how the Rough Riders, who were volunteer troops, and the Tenth Cavalry, who were colored, would behave; so there was a tendency to exalt our deeds at the expense of those of the First Regulars,”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“only regretting that I had not left my sword with it, as it kept getting between my legs when I was tearing my way through the jungle.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“was still very much in the dark as to where the main body of the Spanish forces were, or exactly what lines the battle was following, and was very uncertain what I ought to do; but I knew it could not be wrong to go forward, and I thought I would find Wood and then see what he wished me to do.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“No man was allowed to drop out to help the wounded. It was hard to leave them there in the jungle, where they might not be found again until the vultures and the land-crabs came, but war is a grim game and there was no choice.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“There was not a single straggler among them, and in not one instance was an attempt made by any trooper to fall out in order to assist the wounded or carry back the dead, while so cool were they and so perfect their fire discipline, that in the entire engagement the expenditure of ammunition was not over ten rounds per man.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“In their place we found hundreds of Cuban insurgents, a crew of as utter tatterdemalions as human eyes ever looked on,”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“tatterdemalions”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“He knew the sign language, familiar to all the Indians of the mountains and the plains; and it was curious to find that the signs for different animals, for water, for sleep and death, which he knew from holding intercourse with the tribes of the Southeast, were exactly like those which I had picked up on my occasional hunting or trading trips among the Sioux and Mandans of the North.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“Everywhere we saw the Stars and Stripes, and everywhere we were told, half-laughing, by grizzled ex-Confederates that they had never dreamed in the bygone days of bitterness to greet the old flag as they now were greeting it, and to send their sons, as now they were sending them, to fight and die under it.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“We were travelling through a region where practically all the older men had served in the Confederate Army, and where the younger men had all their lives long drunk in the endless tales told by their elders, at home, and at the cross-roads taverns, and in the court-house squares, about the cavalry of Forrest and Morgan and the infantry of Jackson and Hood. The blood of the old men stirred to the distant breath of battle; the blood of the young men leaped hot with eager desire to accompany us. The older women, who remembered the dreadful misery of war--the misery that presses its iron weight most heavily on the wives and the little ones--looked sadly at us; but the young girls drove down in bevies, arrayed in their finery, to wave flags in farewell to the troopers and to beg cartridges and buttons as mementos.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“There was enough delay and failure to make connections on the part of the railroad people to keep me entirely busy, not to speak of seeing at the stopping-places that the inexperienced officers got enough hay for their horses, and that the water given to them was both ample in quantity and drinkable. It happened that we usually made our longest stops at night, and this meant that we were up all night long.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“There were no proper facilities for getting the horses on or off the cars, or for feeding or watering them; and there was endless confusion and delay among the railway officials.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“A huge red-headed Irishman was named "Sheeny Solomon." A young Jew who developed into one of the best fighters in the regiment accepted, with entire equanimity, the name of "Pork-chop.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“The regiment attracted adventurous spirits from everywhere. Our chief trumpeter was a native American, our second trumpeter was from the Mediterranean--I think an Italian--who had been a soldier of fortune not only in Egypt, but in the French Army in Southern China. Two excellent men were Osborne, a tall Australian, who had been an officer in the New South Wales Mounted Rifles; and Cook, an Englishman, who had served in South Africa.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

“It was Dr. Church who first gave me an idea of Bucky O'Neill's versatility, for I happened to overhear them discussing Aryan word-roots together, and then sliding off into a review of the novels of Balzac, and a discussion as to how far Balzac could be said to be the founder of the modern realistic school of fiction.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders