from http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html
"It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of
success; and their can be no falser standard than that set by the
deification of material well-being in and for itself. But the man who,
having far surpassed the limits of providing for the wants; both of the
body and mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a
great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no
corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to
feel that, so far from being desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the
community: that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his
right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship,
and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of
purpose is even lower than his own."
"It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in democracy should be
able to state his views clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory
can do of value to the community is enable the man thus to explain
himself; if it enables the orator to put false values on things, it merely
makes him power for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not that
gift at all, and must merely rely on their deeds to speak for them; and
unless oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common
sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the
better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives.
Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if
the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value
words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are
supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker,
however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety,
and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic,
and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admire
the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is
to do wrong to the republic."
"Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man
more evil if they are merely used for that man's own advancement, with
brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the
community if the community worships these qualities and treats their
possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly
or wrongly. It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this
sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference whether such a man's
force and ability betray themselves in a career of money-maker or
politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man
works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be
despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man
merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large
habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the
wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the
last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship,
and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for
liberty."
" We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme
individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet
we should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we
continually find that things which once it was desirable to leave to
individual initiative can, under changed conditions, be performed with
better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally
undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which shall always
divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not cursed with the
pride of the closest philosopher will see, if he will only take the
trouble to think about some of our closet phenomena. For instance, when
people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left
to attend to its own drainage and water-supply; but the mere
multiplication of families in a given area produces new problems which,
because they differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree, but
in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage and water-supply have
to be considered from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for
abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point is reached; it is a matter
to be tested by practical experiment. Much of the discussion about
socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of the failure
to agree on terminology. It is not good to be a slave of names. I am a
strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but
it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the
community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better
than if they were left to individual action. The individualism which finds
its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the
growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to
shackle or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning,
which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We
ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and the
equality of opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and more into the
tool-owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably borne. The
deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme
socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer
destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler
immortality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we may
not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some
given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to
do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part."
" The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of
pride he will see to it that others receive liberty which he thus claims
as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country
in the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only
should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but
complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided
only that in so he does not wrong his neighbor. Persecution is bad because
it is persecution, and without reference to which side happens at the most
to be the persecutor and which the persecuted."
"In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of
conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide
differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social
belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if
there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based
on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that
fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or
antidemocratic, it itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which
has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations."
"Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic
should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him
on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that
he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at
the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference
whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or
antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be
presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very
last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic
community should do is to reward any public man because that public man
says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private
citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which
this private citizen ought not to possess."
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