By God, if you try anything like that, I'll kick you, I'll bite you, I'll kick you in the balls. I'll do anything to you — you'd better leave me alone.

1881, to "Big John" McManus, a Tammany Hall politician in the New York State Assembly, about a plan to humiliate Roosevelt by tossing him in a blanket. Quoted in "I Rose Like a Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt" (2007) by Paul Grondahl, pg 3. Also quoted in The War Lovers (2010) by Evan Thomas.