Roosevelt spoke these words at the Sorbonne in Paris on 23 April 1910, in an address he titled “Citizenship in a Republic.” The wording above matches the speech as printed later that same year in his collected African and European Addresses — though most versions circulating online are quietly reworded.
“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” Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," address at the Sorbonne, Paris, 23 April 1910 — printed in African and European Addresses, with an introduction by Lawrence F. Abbott (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1910). Verified at quotle.info. Verbatim: “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. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
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Provenance
The source
Speech
Citizenship in a Republic
Delivered
The Sorbonne, Paris — 23 April 1910
First book printing
African and European Addresses, with an introduction by Lawrence F. Abbott (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910)
Speaker’s standing
Former U.S. president, in office 1901–1909; a private citizen in 1910
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. 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 short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the 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 know neither victory nor defeat.
Sorbonne, Paris · 23 April 1910
In the speech the passage arrives as part of a warning to “the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure” against a cheap temptation, and is followed immediately by a rebuke to the man of cultivated taste who lets refinement curdle into fastidiousness — context preserved in the full speech text ↗.
Took the wording from the 1910 book itself — the scanned G. P. Putnam’s Sons printing of African and European Addresses on the Internet Archive ↗, which prints the address as delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, on 23 April 1910.
Cross-checked the paragraph word for word against Project Gutenberg’s transcription ↗ of that same 1910 book — identical. The Wikisource copy ↗ is a convenient full text but departs from the printing at three points in this passage (it has “who errs, who comes short,” “knows great enthusiasms” and “who neither know victory nor defeat”); we print the book reading.
Verified the bibliographic record for that edition — G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London, 1910 — on the Internet Archive scan ↗, which also flags the volume as not in copyright.
Roosevelt delivered the speech in April 1910 and it was published in book form that same year, in African and European Addresses (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons) — comfortably before the 1931 U.S. copyright threshold, so the text is in the public domain in the United States. The Internet Archive’s scan of that edition is likewise recorded as not in copyright, with no known restrictions on use.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What usually goes wrong
Unusually for a quotation this famous, the attribution itself is solid. What goes wrong is everything around it — the wording, the occasion, the title of the speech, and who gets the credit for making it famous.
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WordingThe reworded version that circulates online paraphrase
A very widely reproduced text runs “not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better… whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood,” and drops Roosevelt’s clause “because there is no effort without error and shortcoming” altogether — see, for instance, this rendering ↗. The 1910 printing reads “stumbles… could have done them better” and “marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
He was not president when he said it. Roosevelt served from 1901 to 1909 and delivered this address about a year after leaving office, as a private citizen making his way home from an African safari by way of Europe — Mental Floss ↗ describes him as “the former president—who left office in 1909.”
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Title“The Man in the Arena” nickname
That is the popular name the passage gave the speech, not Roosevelt’s own title. The address is “Citizenship in a Republic,” as the Theodore Roosevelt Center ↗ records.
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CreditBrené Brown popularizer, not author
Her book Daring Greatly takes its title from this passage and she has quoted and paraphrased it in her talks, which has led some readers to file the words under her name. The phrase is Roosevelt’s, from 1910 (Mental Floss ↗).
✓Roosevelt really did say it, at the Sorbonne on 23 April 1910 — and the wording to trust is the one printed in his own African and European Addresses later that year: read the speech ↗.
Context
Why it mattered
Roosevelt arrived at the Sorbonne in April 1910 as a private citizen — he had left the presidency about a year earlier and had spent much of the interval on safari in central Africa before swinging north through Europe. The address he gave was long and wide-ranging, taking in citizenship, war, property, and the duty to raise children — a passage on “the curse of sterility” which Lawrence F. Abbott, who was travelling with him, glossed as an attack on race suicide delivered “to a race whose population is diminishing.” The famous passage is only a few sentences inside it, and it lands in a very specific place: a warning aimed at the man of learning and lettered leisure, who is tempted by the cheap satisfaction of standing back and pointing out how badly everyone else is doing.
By one account of the day, crowds packed the streets outside the hall and the applause several times ran on for two minutes — a reception described as extraordinary for a foreign lecturer (Mental Floss ↗). The speech has been quoted by public figures ever since, which is part of why the wording drifted so far from the page.
who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly
Where the passage turned up later
Wikipedia’s article on the speech records later invocations of the passage by Richard Nixon (in his 1968 victory speech and his 1974 resignation address), by Nelson Mandela — who gave it to South African rugby captain François Pienaar before the 1995 Rugby World Cup — and by Barack Obama at the 2016 Democratic National Convention: Citizenship in a Republic ↗.
Each retelling is an opportunity for a word to slip. That is the ordinary mechanism by which a well-documented quotation becomes a half-remembered one, and it is why the 1910 printing — not the poster — is the text to check against.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1858–1919 · 26th U.S. president, soldier, naturalist and prolific author
Theodore Roosevelt served as the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, then left the White House and promptly spent a year hunting and collecting specimens in central Africa before touring Europe. He was one of the most compulsively published presidents in American history — histories, nature writing, memoirs and hundreds of speeches — which is precisely why this line can be pinned to a page rather than merely believed. The Sorbonne address of April 1910 was delivered when he held no office at all: he was a private citizen with an enormous audience.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this source
Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” address delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, 23 April 1910, in African and European Addresses, with an introduction by Lawrence F. Abbott (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘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’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-is-not-the-critic-who-counts-not-the-man-who-points-out/