Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| believe that we have more to do than to simply accomplish material prosperity; unless, in short, we do our full duty as private citizens, interested alike in the honor of the state.” |
| “A nation’s greatness lies in its possibility of achievement in the present, and nothing helps it more than consciousness of achievement in the past.” |
| “Boasting and blustering are as objectionable among nations as among individuals, and the public men of a great nation owe it to their sense of national self-respect to speak courteously of foreign powers, just as a brave and self-respecting man treats all around him courteously.” |
| The famous phrase, “the strenuous life,” is from his speech to the Hamilton Club, in Chicago, in 1899. This was the sentence in which it occurred: |
| “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from |