The former president of the United States Theodore
Roosevelt, slightly more than a year out of office, delivered perhaps his most
famous speech at the Sorbonne in Paris on 23 April 1910. Although its formal title is “Citizenship in
a Republic,” it is probably more widely known as “The Man in the Arena.” His statements at the Sorbonne were
part of a larger European trip that also included visits to Vienna, Budapest,
and Oslo, where on 5 May 1910, he delivered his acceptance speech for the 1906
Nobel Peace Prize, which he had won for his efforts in bringing an end to the
Russo-Japanese War. I share here the
most famous passage from “Citizenship in a Republic” — a personal favorite of
mine, for whatever that’s worth — accompanied by the important paragraph that
precedes it and some of the important lines that follow it:
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and
cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who
has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one.
The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who
feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves
to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt.
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who
either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief
toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble
effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. 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 as the possessor would fain to
think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their
part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of
contempt for the achievement of others, to hide from others and from themselves
their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role
of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
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
again, because 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 neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of
cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that
unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples
who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men
of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room
is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear
the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they
would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what
they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the
pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little
use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion,
of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell
the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also,
though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and
have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with
hard fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory we
love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile
guns would have been a valiant soldier.”
