
“It is not the critic who counts,” said one Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech whose oft-quoted middle excerpt has its own title, The Man in the Arena. “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 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.”
Roosevelt, having spent time in British East Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, is mentioned in How to Build a Library (2025), a documentary that unwittingly casts the McMillan library as the decaying backdrop against which much of the drama about attempting to renovate an old, colonial library unfolds.
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