20 Theodore Roosevelt Quotes on Work

Theodore Roosevelt quotes on work

4. I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

9. I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.

   Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

11. The first requisite of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight; that he shall not be a mere passenger, but shall do his share in the work that each generation of us finds ready to hand; and, furthermore, that in doing his work he shall show, not only the capacity for sturdy self-help, but also self-respecting regard for the rights of others.

14. Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

24. We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the businessman is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals.

37. In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard.

43. Where men are gathered together in great masses it inevitably results that they must work far more largely through combinations than where they live scattered and remote from one another: Under present-day conditions it is necessary to have corporations in the business world as it is to have organizations, unions, among wage workers.

45. In our complex industrial civilization of today the peace of righteousness and justice, the only kind of peace worth having, is at least as necessary in the industrial world as it is among nations. There is at least as much need to curb the cruel greed and arrogance of part of the world of capital, to curb the cruel greed and violence of part of the world of labor, as to check a cruel and unhealthy militarism in international relationships.

68. Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

73. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

77. I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.

80. I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

90. It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

92. It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

96. Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

98. No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

116. The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

117. The man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic-the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.

134. We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always be done.

136. When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.