Roosevelt's "The Man in the Arena"

MentalFloss ^ | April 23, 2015 | Erin McCarthy

[Daffynition]

Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images

On April 23, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave what would become one of the most widely quoted speeches of his career. The former president—who left office in 1909—had spent a year hunting in Central Africa before embarking on a tour of Northern Africa and Europe in 1910, attending events and giving speeches in places like Cairo, Berlin, Naples, and Oxford. He stopped in Paris on April 23, and, at 3 p.m. at the Sorbonne, before a crowd that included, according to the Edmund Morris biography Colonel Roosevelt, “ministers in court dress, army and navy officers in full uniform, nine hundred students, and an audience of two thousand ticket holders,” Roosevelt delivered a speech called “Citizenship in a Republic,” which, among some, would come to be known as “The Man in the Arena.”

[Bratch]

TR had more testosterone in his thumb than all the government betas in DC.