[… 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 (1901–09)

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