[… T]he individual virtues, and the necessity of character as the chief factor in any man’s success — a teaching in which I now believe as sincerely as ever, for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of the rights of others.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, statesman, conservationist, writer, US President (1901–1909)

Autobiography, ch. 1 “Boyhood and Youth” (1913)
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