It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things. - Theodore Roosevelt

In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret?

[Theodore Roosevelt 1901 relating reports of water torture in the Philippines to lynching in the south]

The American people should itself do these things for the immigrants. If we leave the immigrant to be helped by representatives of foreign governments, by foreign societies, by a press and institutions conducted in a foreign language and in the interest of foreign governments, and if we permit the immigrants to exist as alien groups, each group sundered from the rest of the citizens of the country, we shall store up for ourselves bitter trouble in the future.