One hundred years ago today, President Theodore Roosevelt gave his Citizenship in a Republic speech. The Man in the Arena is a famous paragraph from that speech:
It is not the critic who counts;
not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and againbecause there is no effort without error and shortcoming;
but who does actually strive to do the deeds;
who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls
who know neither victory nor defeat.
Roosevelt firmly believed that one learned by doing. It is better to stumble than to do nothing or to sit by and criticize those that are in the arena. He said, “The poorest way to face life is with a sneer… A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not … of superiority but of weakness.”
The speech emphasized his belief that the success of a republic rested not on the brilliance of its citizens but on disciplined work and character; the quality of its people.
A democracy needed leaders of the highest caliber in order to hold the average citizen to a high standard. They were to do this not by words alone but by their deeds as well. “Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory if they tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand.”
Read the complete text of Theodore Roosevelt’s speech: Citizenship in a Republic
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