Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.
— Theodore Roosevelt
About this Quote
Quote in Context
You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. It shall profit us nothing if our people are decent and ineffective. It shall profit us nothing if they are efficient and wicked. In every walk of life, in business, politics; if the need comes, in war; in literature, science, art, in everything, what we need is a sufficient number of men who can work well and who will work with a high ideal. The work can be done in a thousand different ways. Our public life depends primarily not upon the men who occupy public positions for the moment, because they are but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Our public life depends upon men who take an active interest in that public life; who are bound to see public affairs honestly and competently managed; but who have the good sense to know what honesty and competency actually mean. And any such man, if he is both sane and high-minded, can be a greater help and strength to any one in public life than you can easily imagine without having had yourselves the experience. It is an immense strength to a public man to know a certain number of people to whom he can appeal for advice and for backing; whose character is so high that baseness would shrink ashamed before them; and who have such good sense that any decent public servant is entirely willing to lay before them every detail of his actions, asking only that they know the facts before they pass final judgment.
Quote Source Information
• Source: Wikiquote: "Theodore Roosevelt" (Quotes, 1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904): Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School, Groton, Massachusetts (May 24, 1904) Source: Presidential Addresses and State Papers Volume III 'April 7, 1904, to May 9, 1905' by Theodore Roosevelt, The Review of Reviews Company, New York (1910), p. 8-20)
About this Picture
Name: Muir and Roosevelt restored
Description: U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and nature preservationist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. In the background: Upper and lower Yosemite Falls.
Date: Copyright 1906
Source:
Author: Underwood & Underwood
Cite This Page
Use the citations below to reference the quotation on this page:
For general use. A combination of the APA, Chicago and MLA citation styles.
“Theodore Roosevelt Quotes.” QuotesCosmos.com, Last modified July 31, 2021. https://www.quotescosmos.com/quotes/Theodore-Roosevelt-quote-38.html
Use APA (American Psychological Association) for education, psychology, and the sciences.
Theodore Roosevelt Quotes. Retrieved from https://www.quotescosmos.com/quotes/Theodore-Roosevelt-quote-38.html
Use Chicago style for business, fine arts, and history.
“Theodore Roosevelt Quotes.” QuotesCosmos.com, edited by QuotesCosmos, 31 July 2021, https://www.quotescosmos.com/quotes/Theodore-Roosevelt-quote-38.html
MLA Citation: Use MLA (Modern Language Association) style for the humanities, especially language and literature.
“Theodore Roosevelt Quotes.” Last modified July 31, 2021. https://www.quotescosmos.com/quotes/Theodore-Roosevelt-quote-38.html