On a 1910 trip to Paris, Theodore Roosevelt delivered his famous speech about “The Man In The Arena,” which has since been widely adopted by a very specific kind of Silicon Valley cretin. It’s quite a long speech, but here’s the part that they love to share:
“conveyor belt of mediocre men who have convinced themselves they’re gods.”
In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt concluded his Lincoln Day Dinner speech with the proclamation that “race purity must be maintained.”13 By 1906 he blatantly equated the falling birth rate among native-born whites with the impending threat of “race suicide.” In his State of the Union message that year Roosevelt admonished the well-born white women who engaged in “willful sterility—the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race suicide.”14 These comments were made during a period of accelerating racist ideology and of great waves of race riots and lynchings on the domestic scene. Moreover, President Roosevelt himself was attempting to muster support for the U.S. seizure of the Philippines, the country’s most recent imperialist venture.
Another Roosevelt banger:
From Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class