Theodore Roosevelt — Do What You Can

Theodore Roosevelt published his Autobiography in 1913, four years out of the White House and a year after losing his run for a third term. In it he gave the credit for one of his favorite maxims to a country squire named Bill Widener, of Widener's Valley, Virginia, whose version ran "Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are."

Roosevelt had lived by it for thirty years — as an asthmatic boy who built his own body, a New York assemblyman at twenty-three, a rancher in the Dakota Badlands, the colonel of the Rough Riders in Cuba, and a president at forty-two, the youngest the country has had.

The line is usually printed as his. He would have insisted it wasn't.

Roosevelt faces right in a pale lavender-blue, hair parted, the pince-nez perched on his nose, the mustache turned up at the corner. The silhouette runs off the bottom of the sheet so the shoulders and lapels become a field of quiet color. The maxim sits across the face in five lines of red serif, the largest words widest, the last line — "where you are." — anchoring the whole page. The attribution below is small and unfussy.