To My Fellow-Disciples at Saratoga Springs (1895)
Context: We may blunder on in spite of repeated miscalculations of the popular will. More penetrating and pernicious is the influence our ill-devised machinery has upon the character of our national life. It eats in and into it. It degrades candidates and electors alike. It does its worst to reduce to sterility of influence many of the best of the component elements of the people. The individuals survive, but with their political activity dead or dying, no opportunities of life and growth being afforded them. Finally it presents as an embodiment of the nation an assembly or assemblies into which none can enter who have not been clipped, and pared, and trimmed, and stretched out of natural shape and likeness to slip along the grooves of supply. A free press, free pulpits, and a free people outside help to correct what would otherwise become intolerable but press, pulpits and people, free as they are, work and live in strict limits of relation to the machinery established among them. The world revolves on its axis subject to the Constitution of the United States, and the most Radical newspaper man in London, if such there be, never lets his imagination range out of hearing of the Clock Tower.
“Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”
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Theodore Roosevelt 445
American politician, 26th president of the United States 1858–1919Related quotes
On Protracted Warfare (1938)
Context: Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. People necessarily wield military and economic power.
Source: 11-12 July 1941, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
On the Educational Value of the Medical Society (1903)
Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (1774)
March 24, 1966, page 216.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council
p 23
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Observations on the Greenland Trade, Chart XVIII, page 78.
The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd Edition
'Why I Am a Socialist', South Leeds Worker (December 1937), quoted in Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (1979), p. 68