45 Quotes by Edmund Morris

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.

Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor’s historic threat of violence against capital.

Later he wrote to Lodge: “I don’t grudge the broken arm a bit... I’m always ready to pay the piper when I’ve had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.

In El Paso,” the President said approvingly, “the people are homicidal but orthodox.

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.

Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.

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.

He castigates his habitual targets, “the dull, the feeble, and the timid good,” and proclaims himself a strong man, careless of class, color, or party politics. “If I find a public servant who is dishonest, I will chop his head off if he is the highest Republican in this municipality!

Immersion in no way affected Roosevelt’s cheerful volubility. “I never saw a man who talked so much,” Rondon marveled. “I used to love to watch him think... for he always gesticulated. He would be alone, not saying a word, yet his hands would be moving, and he would be waving his arms and nodding his head with the greatest determination, as though arguing with somebody else.