In foreign affairs we must make up our minds that whether we wish it or not, we are a great people and must play a great part in the world. It is not open to us to choose whether we will play that great part or not.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena..who errs, who comes short again and again; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who spends himself in a worthy cause.
The duties are even more important than the rights; and in the long run I think that the reward is ampler and greater for duty well done, than for the insistence upon individual rights.
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done ... Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble, and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.
'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.
This broken country extends back from the river for many miles and has been called always be Indian, French voyager and American trappers alike, the Bad Lands.
It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form... they shall do so under absolutely truthful representations... Great corporations exist only because they were created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.
I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action.
Courage is not having the strength to go on, it is going on when you don't have the strength. Industry and determination can do anything that genius and advantage can do and many things that they cannot.
It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worthhearing; but as a rule they don't know anything outside their own business.
[Among the books he chooses, a statesman] ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.
The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.