Recently, someone I meet with regularly read me a quote from Teddy Roosevelt that he found inspiring. As a librarian, my instinct was to go find the source of that quote, to verify that it was really what Roosevelt said and where he said it. In my experience, quotes are notoriously unreliable and poorly documented.
This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, although I was able to track down what I wanted after a while. In the process, I came across another quote of his. I have very ambivalent feelings about this famous American president, but the guy certainly was eminently quotable:
This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country.
From a speech given in Memphis, TN, 25 October 1905.
I wonder, who does that immediately bring to mind? Hmm? Although, as I’ve said many times before, the real problem isn’t one man, it’s the many thousands or millions of people who put him in power and continue to support him.
