That is not to say I don't have strong opinions or ideas about what's right and wrong and who's good and bad and who's going get my vote. It just means I don't talk about politics.

But I do like people and some of my examples in life have been Presidents like Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt (Teddy), Kennedy and Reagan.

Presidents talk a lot and I have some favorite thoughts in harmony with theirs in the form of quotations from them. Perhaps my favorite quotation of all favorites is one from the dynamic Theodore Roosevelt.

Teddy is my favorite President for a lot of reasons: the Teddy Bear was named in his honor being one; and that 'speak softly and carry a big stick' thing has always appealed to me a little even on a personal level.

In many ways, TR was larger than life. A child of ill health, he overcame it to become a great proponent and lived an active lifestyle. (In other words, he didn't just talk the talk.) In 1884 his first wife, Alice Lee Roosevelt, and his mother died on the same day. Roosevelt spent much of the next two years on his ranch in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. There he mastered his sorrow as he lived in the saddle, driving cattle, hunting big game--he even captured an outlaw.

During the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt was a lieutenant colonel of the Rough Rider Regiment, which he led on a charge at the battle of San Juan. He was one of the most conspicuous heroes of the war.

In 1896 at the age of 36, he was elected Governor of New York and in 1896 and at 43 -- youngest ever-- he was thrust from the Vice Presidency into the Presidency after the assignation of President William McKinley.

He was a man of action and he led America to progressive reforms and a strong foreign policy. As President, Roosevelt held the ideal that the Government should be the great arbiter of conflicting economic forces in the Nation, especially between capital and labor, guaranteeing justice to each and dispensing favors to none.

Roosevelt emerged spectacularly as a "trust buster" by forcing the dissolution of a great railroad combination in the Northwest. Other antitrust suits followed under the Sherman Act.

He took the view that the President was a "steward of the people" and should take whatever action necessary for the public good unless expressly forbidden by law or the Constitution." I did not usurp power," he later wrote, "but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power."

Recognizing the strategic need for a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific, Roosevelt ensured the construction of the Panama Canal. His corollary to the Monroe Doctrine prevented the establishment of foreign bases in the Caribbean and enforced a sole right of intervention in Latin America to the United States.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War but maybe his best achievements were in conservation. He more than quadrupled the national forests in the West, reserved millions of acres of lands for public use, and sponsored great irrigation projects.

He crusaded endlessly for an against things that mattered to him -- big and small --exciting audiences with his high-pitched voice, his jutting jaw, and his pounding fist. The term, "Bully Pulpit" as it refers to the Presidency was coined just for Teddy.

After leaving the Presidency in 1909, he went on an African Safari and in 1912 jumped back into politics running again for the Presidency on a Progressive ticket. While campaigning for that office in Milwaukee, he was shot in the chest but rapidly recovered. He didn't win that third term, but took enough votes away from William Howard Taft to ensure the victory of a little-known Ivy League Professor named Woodrow Wilson and a defeat for the Republican Party that had rejected him in 1912.

So what does all this have to do with comments to blogs?

I'll let Teddy say it like he did on April 23, 1910, during a speech titled "Citizenship in a Republic" at the Sorbonne University in Paris:

"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 better. 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 and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for 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 he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Comment away.