Wednesday marked the 97th anniversary of President (and United States Army colonel) Teddy Roosevelt’s death. The “Rough Rider” passed away on January 6, 1919, at the age of 60, of a blood clot while asleep. His last words were to his butler: “Please put out that light, James.”

When his son, Archibald, received news that his father had died, he telegraphed his siblings with the words, “The old lion is dead”.

He’s buried in Oyster Bay, on Long Island, in New York state.

Roosevelt’s most beloved aphorism, “speak softly but a carry a big stick”, is actually just a snippet of his entire original saying. First uttered at the Minnesota State Fair in 1901, it closed with the promising few words “and you will go far.”

The big stick, of course, being the American military and its capability. The quote, more than a century old now, still resonates with the U.S. citizenry as well as its leaders. Since it’s influenced an entire idealogy — “Big Stick diplomacy” or “Big Stick policy”, which Teddy described as “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently fair in advance of any likely crisis.”