![]() Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it's understanding the necessity of both it's engaging. Everything I've learned from over a decade of research on vulnerability has taught me this exact lesson. “The first time I read this quote,” Brown writes in the introduction to Daring Greatly, “I thought, This is vulnerability. Brené Brown paraphrased it in a TED Talk and used Roosevelt’s phrase daring greatly as the title of one of her books. It was quoted by Nixon in his resignation speech (“Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena. When Richard Nixon resigned, he quoted "The Man in the Arena." / Keystone/GettyImages Roosevelt might be even more surprised to learn that the most famous section of his speech still resonates and inspires, even today. The Enduring Legacy of “The Man in the Arena” Roosevelt himself, however, was apparently shocked by how his speech was received, “admitting to Henry Cabot Lodge that the reaction of the French was ‘a little difficult for me to understand,’” Morris wrote. It ran in the Journal des Debats as a Sunday supplement, got sent to the teachers of France by Le Temps, was printed by Librairie Hachette on Japanese vellum, was turned into a pocket book that sold 5000 copies in five days, and was translated across Europe. “Citizenship in a Republic”-which Morris called “one of greatest rhetorical triumphs”-made headlines around the world. “So eager was every one to get a glimpse of Roosevelt that frequent clashes with the police occurred.” “Several times the applause lasted two minutes and was probably the greatest demonstration ever given a foreign lecturer,” one newspaper noted. 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 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.” ![]() “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. Then he delivered an inspirational and impassioned message that drew huge applause: ![]() Theodore Roosevelt delivering a speech in Yonkers, New York. “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. “The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer,” he said. In addition to touching on his own family history, war, human and property rights, the responsibilities of citizenship, and France’s falling birthrate, Roosevelt railed against cynics who looked down at men who were trying to make the world a better place. At 3 p.m., before a crowd that included “ministers in court dress, army and navy officers in full uniform, nine hundred students, and an audience of two thousand ticket holders,” according to the Edmund Morris biography Colonel Roosevelt, Roosevelt delivered a speech called “ Citizenship in a Republic,” which would come to be known as “The Man in the Arena.” “It’s Not the Critic Who Counts” He stopped in Paris on April 23 and made his way to the Sorbonne, where “fully 25,000 persons packed the streets,” in the words of the newspapers. 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. Over the course of his time in the public eye, Theodore Roosevelt gave a number of moving, influential, highly quotable public addresses-but none of them has the legacy of the speech he delivered in Paris on April 23, 1910, which would become one of the most widely quoted orations of his career.
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