Theodore Roosevelt is a natural choice for leadership education. Along with many other observers, I believe he was among the greatest of leaders to serve as president.
Mr. Roosevelt, this is my principal request--it is almost the last request I shall ever make of anybody. Before you leave the presidential chair, recommend Congress to submit to the Legislatures a Constitutional Amendment which will enfranchise women, and thus take your place in history with Lincoln, the great emancipator. I beg of you not to close your term of office without doing this.
Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution.
A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother. She was an unhappy wife. She had never known what it was to be a good mother. She didn't have a good mother of her own. And so there's a kind of parenting that doesn't happen.
I mean, in the campaign of '24 and in '28 and '32, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt insists that women have equal floor space. And this is a great victory over time. Then she wants women represented in equal numbers as men. And she wants the women to name the delegates. And the men want to name the delegates. Well, Eleanor is absolutely furious. And because they don't want her to walk away in 1924, she wins. And this is a great political victory. She has floor space equal to the men, and she has the right to name the women.
To meet Roosevelt with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescence, was like opening a bottle of champagne.
I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hoped for, President Truman worked for, and President Kennedy died for.
Franklin Roosevelt was very concerned about environmental issues.
I also learned from reading the left-wing press about the [Franklin] Roosevelt administration's indirect support for Francisco Franco, which was not well known, and still isn't.
You always admire what you really don't understand. - Eleanor Roosevelt
With self-discipline most anything is possible. Theodore Roosevelt Rule your mind or it will rule you.
I am a Republican. I'm loyal to the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. And I believe that my party, in some ways, has strayed from those principles, particularly on the issue of fiscal discipline.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, always do what you`re afraid to do.
If Roosevelt were alive he'd turn in his grave.
[John] McCain references favorite presidents like Teddy Roosevelt. Hillary cited Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about Franklin D. Roosevelt. A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.
My own special relationship with America began at an early age. My father, a fellow journalist, named me after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known - and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.
Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.
