Activists From The United States

"When you trade among the stars, there is no repeat business."

"A species that can’t develop spaceflight is no better than animals."

"I had to grin. Morris was shocked and horrified. I’d shown him a brand new sin."

"Presently she gave her considered opinion. “Idiots.” “No. They’re just like all of us: They want something for nothing.”"

"The trouble with sharing too many beds was that one’s chance of running into a really bad situation was improved almost to certainty."

"“Do you like strange places and faraway people—or vice versa?” “Both.”"

"Talking to the Council would be like shouting obscenities at a forest fire."

"Drugs: “There’s no way to keep them from getting in. Anyone who wants drugs can get them. We make arrests where we can, and so what? Me, I’m betting on Darwin.” “How do you mean?” “The next generation won’t use drugs because they’ll be descended from people who had better sense.”"

"For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt."

"There’s always another problem behind the one you just solved. Does that mean that you should stop solving problems?"

"Once the ocean teamed with life, Svetz thought. Now the continental shelf is as dead as the moon: nothing but bubble cities. Once this whole continent was all forest and living desert and fresh water. We cut down the trees and shot the animals and poisoned to the rivers and irrigated the deserts so that even the desert life died; and now there’s nothing left but the food yeast and us. We’ve forgotten so much about the past that we can’t separate legend from fact. We’ve wiped out most of the forms of life on earth in the last fifteen hundred years, and changed the composition of the air to the extent that we’d be afraid to change it back. I fear the unknown beasts of the past. I cannot breathe the air. I do not know the edible plants. I could not kill the animals for food. I do not know which would kill me. The earth’s past is as alien to me as another planet."

"But the horse ran on, daring Svetz with its eyes. How to describe such motion? Svetz had never seen ballet. He knew how machinery moved, and this wasn’t it. All he could think of was a man and a woman making love. Slippery-smooth rhythmic motion, absolute single-minded purpose, motion for the pleasure of motion. It was terrible in its beauty, the flight of the horse."

"Any time seems long when you need to make a decision but can’t."

"Was he deadpan because he didn’t care anymore? How much boredom can you meet in three hundred years?"

"Just take my word for it, will you? Assume I’m a genius."

"I didn’t want to find her. Not now. Our bargain had been clear, and also inevitable; and there are advantages to sleeping alone. I’ll think of them in a moment."

"“Does it help you to know that you’ve ruined my day?” “It does, yes.”"

"The moral of this story is, anything you don’t understand is dangerous until you do understand it."

"“Do you believe in hunches?” “No.” “Neither do I. Except just this once.”"

"There is no turning away from knowledge."

"Do you know what it’s like to be suddenly poor and not know how to live poor?"

"Part of being a coward is wanting security."

"The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times."

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!"

"Everything starts as somebody's daydream."

"Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn."

"God was knocking, and he wanted in bad."

"Think of it as evolution in action."

"That's the thing about people who think they hate computers … What they really hate are lousy programmers."

"In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs. He should not renounce the right to protect himself by his own efforts until the community is so organized that it can effectively relieve the individual of the duty of putting down violence. So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared to defend itself until the establishment of some form of international police power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between nations. As things are now, such power to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions. The combination might at first be only to secure peace within certain definite limits and on certain definite conditions; but the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination would have earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude of all mankind."

"In the 50 years since caricature became a feature of American journalism," I pointed out, "no man has been the subject of so many cartoons as Roosevelt. A cartoon composite of him would include Don Quixote, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Ananias, Cromwell, Wallenstein, Peter the Great, the Wild Horse of Tartary, Dr. Dowie, a prize-fighter, Savonarola, a circus performer, a hyena, a snapping turtle, the Angel of Peace, Ivan the Terrible, Mohammed, and Moses."

"Teddy had been far to the left for a Republican-but still right of center as far as the Democrats were concerned-and had put into effect a lot of liberal ideas such as conservation of natural resources and the checking of 'malefactors of great wealth.' Taft was an ultra-conservative and partial to the special interests. He was not willing to use the full power of the presidency."

"The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again."

"I felt at the time Mr. Roosevelt had a good deal of the usual conviction of the powerful man in public life that correction should be left to him, a little resentment that a profession outside his own should be stealing his thunder."

"He hammered at the effects of privilege, pursued "malefactors of great wealth," but was not willing to do the hard studying of the causes which produced the malefactors."

"Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy."

"You must always remember that the president is about six."

"If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. When it comes to Wall Street reform, that must be our bottom line. This is true not just because of the risk to our economy of another collapse and another bailout; it is also true because the current extreme concentration of ownership in the financial industry allows a very small number of huge financial institutions to have far too much economic and political power over this country. If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trustbuster, were alive today, he would say, "Break 'em up." And he would be right."

"More than a century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the danger of massive wealth and income inequality and what it meant to the economic and political well-being of the country. In addition to busting up the big trusts of his time, he fought for the creation of a progressive estate tax to reduce the enormous concentration of wealth that existed during the Gilded Age. "The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power," the Republican president said. "The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is passed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in.. a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate." Roosevelt spoke those words on August 31, 1910. They are even more relevant today."

"Roosevelt himself typified the weaknesses of the middle class fight against trustifying capitalism. After this investigation of the Meat Trust, it was clear that Theodore Roosevelt's talk about "trust-busting" was a mere gesture. He saw the popular demand for reform and took it up as a political maneuver. He played up to the small capitalists with a few prosecutions under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He was violent in denouncing Big Business and the "malefactors of great wealth," as he called them. But he did nothing to stop Morgan's U. S. Steel Corporation when it took over the Tennessee Coal & Iron Co. in the panic of 1907. No one took his anti-trust talk very seriously. He was an imperialist employing "dollar diplomacy" to build up American colonies."

"Theodore was the first president in the distinctively modern mold: he had a sense of drama and timing and a natural grasp of how to exploit the press to create a persona for himself in the eyes of the people. Beyond that, TR, as he was commonly known, had a rare ability to make personal use of popular causes and resentments. It was the age of "progressivism," a vague term, but one that connoted a new readiness to use the power of government for all sorts of grand things. H.L. Mencken, the great libertarian journalist and close observer and critic of presidents, compared him to the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, and shrewdly summed him up: "The America that [Theodore] Roosevelt dreamed of was always a sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without and regimented within.""

"This was a period of confusion. The ancient concepts of the rights of man was in conflict with the expansion and needs of big business and mass production. ...[O]ur emotions were inevitably attracted by the dynamic quality of Theodore Roosevelt (whose attachments to the principles of social justice has never been sufficiently developed by his biographers) and by the qualities of leadership in social reform... being demonstrated on the political plane by Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson."

"Like many people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. ...He had recommended to the people 's book How the Other Half Lives. I had read it, and Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural address of 1905, and had straightaway felt that the pursuit of social justice would be my vocation."

"(Would you have taken the same position against the Republicans if that party had been in power in 1914?) AP: Of course. You see, we tried very hard in 1916—wasn’t it [[Charles Evans Hughes|[Charles Evans] Hughes]] running against Wilson that year?—to get the Republicans to put federal suffrage in their platform, and we failed. We also failed with the Democrats. Then we tried to get the support of Mr. Hughes himself. Our New York State committee worked very hard on Mr. Hughes, and they couldn’t budge him. So we went to see former President [Theodore] Roosevelt at his home at Oyster Bay to see if he could influence Mr. Hughes. And I remember so vividly what Mr. Roosevelt said. He said, “You know, in political life you must always remember that you not only must be on the right side of a measure, but you must be on the right side at the right time.” He told us that that was the great trouble with Mr. Hughes, that Mr. Hughes is certainly for suffrage, but he can’t seem to know that he must do it in time. So Mr. Hughes started on his campaign around the country, and when he came to Wyoming, where women were already voting, he wouldn’t say he was for the suffrage amendment. And he went on and on, all around the country. Finally, when he came to make his final speech of the campaign in New York, he had made up his mind, and he came out strongly for the federal suffrage amendment. So it was true what Mr. Roosevelt had said about him."

"The peace the President had made possible at Portsmouth was the result of just such an inexplicable ability to impose his singular charge upon plural power. By sheer force of moral purpose, by clarity of perception, by mastery of detail and benign manipulation of men, he had become, as Henry Adams admiringly wrote him, "the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon.""

"In America, we have a figure from history from 1897 named Teddy Roosevelt. He was a wealthy man, who grew up in a privileged situation and who fought on the front lines. He put together his own men — hand chose them — and went to battle. You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt."

"A crucial embellishment of the origin myth and key element of the national identity has been the myth of the frontier, analyzed in Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation (1992), the last volume of a fascinating trilogy. He describes Theodore Roosevelt's belief that the West was won thanks to American arms, "the means by which progress and nationality will be achieved." That success, Roosevelt continued, "depends on the heroism of men who impose on the course of events the latent virtues of their 'race."" Roosevelt saw conflict on the frontier producing a species of virile "fighters and breeders" who would eventually generate a new leadership class. Militarism thus went hand in hand with the racialization of history's protagonists. No slouch as an imperialist, Roosevelt soon took the frontier myth abroad, seeing Asians as Apaches and the Philippines as Sam Huston's Texas in the process of being seized from Mexico. For Roosevelt, Slotkin writes, "racial violence [was] the principle around which both individual character and social organization develop.""

"Death had to take him in his sleep, for if he was awake there'd have been a fight."

"He was a great patriot, a great man; above all, a great American. His country was the ruling, mastering passion of his life from the beginning even unto the end."

"[A] great American statesman whose vision and superb courage I had always admired—Theodore Roosevelt."