1In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.
2The life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
3A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual.
4I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole.
5Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes — to be the ultimate goal after which they strive?
6We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.
7It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.
8Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
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