这篇演讲中，罗斯福总统明确地向国民提出，唯有努力，艰苦奋斗才能成就一个伟大的民族！他提倡人们不懈地努力，而非享乐，说那些出身高贵不用费心谋生的人一定是祖辈做出了卓绝的贡献，而这些子孙们也应该发挥自己的聪明才智，在除了物质的别的方面有所建树，这点对于当下的中国富二代以及那些仇富的人都有启示：对于我们这样要靠自己白手起家的人，丝毫不用羡慕那些衣食无忧的同辈们，奋斗本来就是人生的应有之义，正是那些幸运儿先辈的努力换来了他们的“好生活”！经过努力，我们也可以过上多彩的生活！

此外，本篇演讲中让我感动的第二个地方是罗斯福提到了要“主动”去奋斗，他说如果没有1861年先辈们的浴血奋战，美国就没有资格屹立于各民族之首！虽然为战争要付出惨重的代价——家破人亡妻儿离散，生产停滞国家受创，但即使面对这些压力和代价，仍要去拼死奋战！因为唯有经历挑战，并且成功，才能赢得尊重，才能不愧为世界大国！作为一个人，也只有不怕奋斗，不怕挑战，不怕艰难困苦，勇敢地去拼搏，才能够实现一个有价值、有意义的人生！这对向来害怕改变，不敢冒险，畏畏缩缩的我有着格外的激励意义！
I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strife after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual

We do not admire the man of timid peace. we admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend; but who has those virile qualities necessary to win the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present, merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or hia fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used a right, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a General, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period not of preparation but of mere surface; and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if he need to do so, should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a satisfactory life, and above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even thought checked by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that know neither victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things and war and strife a worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heart-break of many women, the dissolution of many homes; and we would have spared the country those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering, simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth. Thank god for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln and bore sword or rifles in the armies of Grant!

The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrust his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills stern men with empires in their brains’- all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation.

I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease, but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us, big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease, and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness!