Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma on a working cattle ranch, and it was always very romantic to me: The West, the cowboy, the Western way of life.

There is no such thing as a weekend for me when I'm at home on my ranch in Oregon.

Texas is just so rich with characters. Women who live alone in a little house on a thousand acres with nothing but cattle and a pickup truck. And an airplane.

One of the greatest boons that can ever come to a human being is to be born on a farm and reared in the country. Self-reliance and grit are oftenest country-bred.

Our forbears worked hard this difficult land, and their reward was the freedom and independence of self-sufficiency.

What I learned growing up on the farm was a way of life that was centered on hard work, and on faith and on thrift. Those values have stuck with me my whole life.

In the 1880s, a weedy Easterner named Owen Wister had something like a nervous breakdown. Wyoming, with its wide-open spaces and healthy pursuits, was prescribed as a cure. Wister was immediately smitten by the taciturn cowboys and the rules imposed upon them by the cattle barons.

I want people to see how hard my husband and kids work on the ranch.

In 2005, I visited my home state of Texas, spending time on a ranch outside the town of Post. Then spending some time on a large ranch outside Archer City. I was taken by just how few young people I saw anywhere.

The life my grandparents had was thoroughly American. They built a small ranch into a huge operation and fulfilled my great-grandparents' dreams. Theirs was... a simpler time of contentment and patriotism.

The only 'break' anyone can afford to rely upon is a self-made 'break'.

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.

The result of my hard work is that I'm financially independent, I have an amazing life, and I can do whatever I want. I don't have to answer to anybody.

When you work for others, you are at their mercy. They own your work; they own you. Your creative spirit is squashed. What keeps you in such positions is a fear of having to sink or swim on your own. Instead you should have a greater fear of what will happen to you if you remain dependent on others for power. Your goal in every maneuver in life must be ownership, working the corner for yourself. When it is yours, it is yours to lose - you are more motivated, more creative, more alive. The ultimate power in life is to be completely self-reliant, completely yourself.

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

I have amazing collaborators as well, but I want to learn more and be a self-contained unit.

You have to rely on yourself and your associates - gifts don't come from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them.

If you have a high-way on Everest, you don't meet the mountain. If everything is prepared, and you have a guide who is responsible for your security, you cannot meet the mountain. Meeting mountains is only possible if you . . . are out there in self-sufficiency.

When our identity comes from the self, then we keep our energy to ourselves. We feel energetic, we feel powerful, and we experience youthful vigor.

People that trust wholly to other's charity, and without industry of their own, will always be poor.

As long as a man is persuaded that he can make even the smallest contribution to his salvation, he remains self-confident and does not utterly despair of himself, and so is not humbled before God. Such a man plans out for himself a position, an occasion, a work, which shall bring him final salvation, but which will not.