The Strenuous Life: The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Volume 12 (of 14)Roosevelt, Theodore
General
The Strenuous Life: The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Volume 12 (of 14)
Roosevelt, Theodore
United States -- Colonial question; United States -- Politics and government
“The history of the world shows us that men are not to be counted by
their numbers, but by the fire and vigor of their passions; by their
deep sense of injury; by their memory of past glory; by their eagerness
for fresh fame; by their clear and steady resolution of either ceasing
to live, or of achieving a particular object, which, when it is once
formed, strikes off a load of manacles and chains, and gives free
space to all heavenly and heroic feelings. All great and extraordinary
actions come from the heart. There are seasons in human affairs when
qualities, fit enough to conduct the common business of life, are
feeble and useless, when men must trust to emotion for that safety
which reason at such times can never give. These are the feelings
which led the ten thousand over the Carduchian mountains; these are
the feelings by which a handful of Greeks broke in pieces the power
of Persia; and in the fens of the Dutch and in the mountains of the
Swiss these feelings defended happiness and revenged the oppressions of
man! God calls all the passions out in their keenness and vigor for the
present safety of mankind, anger and revenge and the heroic mind, and a
readiness to suffer—all the secret strength, all the invisible array
of the feelings—all that nature has reserved for the great scenes of
the world. When the usual hopes and the common aids of man are all
gone, nothing remains under God but those passions which have often
proved the best ministers of His purpose and the surest protectors of
the world.”
NATIONAL DUTIES
ADDRESS AT MINNESOTA STATE FAIR, SEPT. 2, 1901
In his admirable series of studies of twentieth-century problems, Dr.
Lyman Abbott has pointed out that we are a nation of pioneers; that the
first colonists to our shores were pioneers, and that pioneers selected
out from among the descendants of these early pioneers, mingled with
others selected afresh from the Old World, pushed westward into the
wilderness and laid the foundations for new commonwealths. They were
men of hope and expectation, of enterprise and energy; for the men of
dull content or more dull despair had no part in the great movement
into and across the New World. Our country has been populated by
pioneers, and therefore it has in it more energy, more enterprise, more
expansive power than any other in the wide world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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