Sunday, May 9, 2010

Do What You Can, With What You Have


Theodore Roosevelt 1858-1919, Twenty-sixth President of the USA

Theodore Roosevelt Quotes:
It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause. Who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.


When President McKinley was shot in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest person ever to become President. He was only 42. A dynamic nationalist, Roosevelt was a popular and controversial president. He greatly expanded presidential power and made the United States the virtual guardian of the Western Hemisphere and a major force in European and Far Eastern affairs. He was also the first president-reformer of the modern era supporting the technological revolution and a nationwide system of commerce and industry. His policies advanced the cause of conservation and the need to conserve natural resources. He increased regulation of business and stimulated the rise of the welfare state.

Roosevelt had great personal charm, remarkable intellectual humility, and a genuine commitment to peace in the abstract. Despite extraordinary services to world peace while president, he came close to being a lover of war. He could be self-righteous and ruthless and his curiosity and his intellectual achievements was the most wide ranging since President Thomas Jefferson.

Roosevelt left the White House and the Presidency in 1909, traveled the world extensively, and then entered and lost the presidential election of 1912 to Woodrow Wilson.

Recurring bouts with malarial fever, picked up during his travels, sapped Roosevelt's strength during his last years. Roosevelt died in his sleep in the "Gate Room" at his home on Sagamore Hill early on the morning of January 6, 1919 from a pulmonary embolism. His son Archie sent a cable to his brothers, "The old lion is dead." He was buried without eulogy, music, or military honors in a plain oak casket at Sagamore Hill

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorius triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.



During a nearly eight-year presidency, Theodore Roosevelt transformed the United States into a world power and the federal government into a vigorous regulator of the industrializing domestic economy. Roosevelt was a frail boy who became a strong man; a soldier who won the Nobel Prize for Peace; a big-game hunter who founded the National Wildlife Refuge System; a historian whose freewheeling revision of the Monroe Doctrine was ultimately dismantled by his fifth cousin Franklin. Above all, he was the son of an elite New York Knickerbocker family who promised “a square deal” for ordinary Americans, taking on powerful lobbies to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission, establish the Department of Labor and Commerce, pass the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts, and file dozens of federal suits against monopolies. Raised by his father to believe in his civic responsibility, certain of his ability to determine what was right, he possessed in abundance the intellectual and physical energies, political acuity, social standing, and charisma to realize many of his convictions.

Roosevelt graduated from Harvard in 1880 and studied law at Columbia before leaving to assume a seat in the state assembly in 1882. In 1902 he became the first president since Washington to make an official visit to Columbia, attending the installation of his friend and political ally Nicholas Murray Butler as president of the University.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.