We cannot do great deeds unless we are willing to do the small things that make up the sum of greatness.
by Theodore Roosevelt
All 554 of TR's quoted lines at the top - then ten working games drawn from his character: the Arena, the Strenuous Week, the Venture Log, the Big Stick, A Book A Day, the Naturalist's Field-Book, the Square Deal, the Charge up Kettle Hill, Your Own Credo, the Source Quiz. The point is not to admire him from the seats; the point is to descend into the arena.
tags: theodore-roosevelt, america, character, strenuous-life, man-in-the-arena, courage, boldness, conservation
IN THE WORDS OF
1858 - 1919
OYSTER BAY · NEW YORK · THE WHITE HOUSE · THE ARENA
THE MAN
Sickly child. Harvard graduate. New York assemblyman at twenty-three. Cattle rancher. Dakota Territory sheriff. Civil Service commissioner. New York City police commissioner. Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Rough Rider. Governor of New York. Vice President. President at forty-two - the youngest in history.
He wrote thirty-eight books. He read a book a day when in office. He was blind in one eye from a boxing match in the White House. He survived an assassination attempt, finished his speech with the bullet still in his chest, and only then allowed himself to be taken to hospital.
THE WORDS
These 554 quotations are drawn from In the Words of Theodore Roosevelt, edited by Patricia O’Toole (Cornell University Press, 2012), itself drawn from the twenty-volume Works edited by Hermann Hagedorn (1926) and the eight-volume Letters edited by Elting Morison (1951).
He spoke in a vast range of registers - the strenuous and the tender, the bullying and the just. The 110 themes in this collection trace a mind that ranged as far as his body did.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.
- “Citizenship in a Republic,” Paris, 1910Theodore Roosevelt was, at thirty-eight, a man who had already been a state assemblyman, an assistant secretary of the navy, a cattle rancher in the Dakota Badlands, a New York City police commissioner, and a colonel commanding the Rough Riders in Cuba. By forty-two he was president of the United States - the youngest in American history. By the end of his life he had written thirty-eight books, conserved one hundred and fifty million acres of wilderness, survived a bullet at point-blank range, and produced what is still the most-quoted speech on the difference between the doer and the critic. The page below leads with all 554 of his quoted lines - and then steps into ten working rooms drawn from his actual character.
The whole catalogue. 554 quotations across 116 topics, drawable, searchable, or unfoldable as a wall. The words the colonies actually carried.
554 quotations · 116 topics · 1882–1919 · arrow-keys to turn pages
We cannot do great deeds unless we are willing to do the small things that make up the sum of greatness.
The ten sections below operationalise his actual habits - the Arena, the Strenuous Life, the Big Stick, the Square Deal, the Naturalist's Field-Book, the Reading Pace, the Credo, the Charge. The point is not to admire him from the seats; the point is to descend into the arena.
The ten interactive sections (II–XI) operationalise TR's actual habits:
The complete corpus is at section I (the Notebook), drawable and searchable.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI