Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

During the Enron debacle, it was workers who took the pounding, not bankers. Not only did Enron employees lose their jobs, many lost their retirement savings. That's because they were at the bottom of the investing food chain.

I want to see my kids grow up in a world that I grew up in, which was it had imagination and it had hope. And all of a sudden, I see that being dissolved, and I see, as a country, as a people, we are a republic. We are a democracy.

If we just go back to the basics... I do not want to give up our republic and become a socialistic ideological nation. That's not who we are.

In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.

If you're a politician and all you care about is staying in office, you're worried about a small group of voters in your district who vote in the primary. If you're a corporation, you need to be much more in synch with public opinion, because you're appealing to people across the spectrum. Ironically, a lot of corporations have to be far more democratic than democratically elected officials.

I would fill the penitentiaries and jails of the United States so full of Trust magnates that their arms and legs would stick out the windows.

... the grand depository of the democratic principles of the Government ...

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.

… the blindness and greed of the so-called captains of industry.

Signs everywhere now show a great moral awakening—the cleaning out of rotten business & still more rotten policies. But we’ve only begun! For the first time, men were questioning the fundamentals of democracy, inquiring whether we truly had self-government in America, or whether it had been corrupted by selfish interests. This questioning came not alone from what one might call the working class, but from middle America as well.

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive. ... And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution.

It is not true at all that a free market will ensure a democracy. It doesn't. There must be a balance between a free market and some regulations which are essential in order to safeguard the interests of consumers and of people in general.

Citizens do not just make up and preserve a Republic; they are its ultimate stakeholders and in fact pillars.

The Democratic Party needs to take a stand against corporate greed.

You can't always say what's popular and you ought to go with it. I think that's why the founders were concerned about direct democracy. That's why we have a republic and that's why we have representatives who who are supposed to look at the issues and to look out for the next generation as well.

A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts—and that is a very good thing.

That's a question best put to Bernie Sanders himself, but I think that he will probably put forward ideas that are related to the corrupting role of Citizens United and Buckley versus Valeo court decisions and the need to restore a by-and-for-the-people republic envisioned in our Constitution instead of the of-, by- and for-the-most-powerful system that we have right now.

The Little Guy, behind whom politicians strategically coalesce — thumping majorities prevail in a democracy — cannot abide by a reality in which greater wealth affords greater "access."

There are people working their butts off trying to save our republic and save democracy from the likes of powerful people in the Democrat Party who want to take this country and turn it into a personal little playground for their own private gain.

A share in the sovereignty of the state, which is exercised by the citizens at large, in voting at elections is one of the most important rights of the subject, and in a republic ought to stand foremost in the estimation of the law...That portion of the sovereignty, to which each individual is entitled, can never be too highly prized. It is that for which we have fought and bled.

That wall, embodied in the First Amendment, is perhaps America's most important contribution to political progress on this planet.

The Right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society.

It's hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.

[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.