Top 100 Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes
#1. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#2. Taxation according to income is the most effective instrument yet devised to obtain just contribution from those best able to bear it and to avoid placing onerous burdens upon the mass of our people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#3. As Americans, we go forward, in the service of our country, by the will of God.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#4. Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#5. I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#6. No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#7. I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people and that I have been given their trust.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#8. Wise and prudent men and intelligent conservatives have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing time.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#9. You'll have to learn that public life takes a lot of sweat. But it doesn't need to worry you. You won't always be right, but you musn't suffer from being wrong.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#10. We now realize as we have never before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take, but we must be willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline, no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#11. You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#13. In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#14. We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#15. That is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns. Now I think we are small enough.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#16. The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate. Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred ...
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#17. In a democratic nation, power must be linked with responsibility, and obliged to defend and justify itself within the framework of the general good.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#20. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob ... [The organized moneyed people] are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred ... I should like to have it said of my second administration that these forces met their master.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#22. Raven Stone and Don Carson are the stupidest fucking people on the planet because their mothers didn't breastfeed them.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#23. All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#25. Economic diseases are highly communicable. It follows therefore that the economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern to all its neighbors, near or distant.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#26. The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#28. True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#29. The Democratic Party will live and continue to receive the support of the majority of Americans just so long as it remains a liberal party.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#31. We are not isolationists except in so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. Yet we must remember that so long as war exists on earth there will be some danger that even the Nation which most ardently desires peace may be drawn into war.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#33. We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#34. Our national debt after all is an internal debt owed not only by the Nation but to the Nation. If our children have to pay interest on it they will pay that interest to themselves. A reasonable internal debt will not impoverish our children or put the Nation into bankruptcy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#35. The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#36. The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#37. Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#38. I consider it a public duty to answer falsifications with facts. I will not pretend that I find this an unpleasant duty. I am an old campaigner, and I love a good fight.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#39. Industrial combination is not wrong in itself. The danger lies in taking government into partnership.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#42. If we do not halt this steady process of building commissions and regulatory bodies and the special legislation like huge inverted pyramids over every one of the simple constitutional provisions, we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#43. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#44. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#45. We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution - not over it. In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#46. We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#48. The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of America is grounded in principles and not on any single personality.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#49. The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#50. The ultimate victory of tomorrow is democracy, and through democracy with education, for no people in all the world can be kept eternally ignorant or eternally enslaved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#51. The people of America are in agreement in defending their liberties at any cost, and the first line of that defense lies in the protection of economic security.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#53. How many people in the United States do you think will be willing to go to war to free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#54. I propose to create a Civilian Conservation Corps to be used in simple work ... More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#56. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#57. Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#58. I ask especially that no state shall, by law or otherwise, authorize the return of the saloon, either in its old form or in some modern guise.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#59. There is much to be said against the climate on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska; yet, I believe that the scenery of one good day will compensate the tourists who will go there in increasing numbers.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#60. Too often in recent history liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#62. Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#63. Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory ... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#64. Inside the polling booth every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American man and woman. There they have no superiors. There they have no masters save their own minds and consciences.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#67. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#68. The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#69. I am ... willing to make it clear that American foreign policy must uphold the sanctity of international treaties. That is the cornerstone on which all relations between nations must rest.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#70. The first theory is that if we make the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us. The second theory was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure, their prosperity will rise upward through the ranks.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#71. Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech Thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of Thy favor and glad to do Thy will.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#72. The gains in education are never really lost. Books may be burned and cities sacked, but truth, like the yearning for freedom, lives in the hearts of humble men.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#75. In these days of difficulty, we Americans everywhere must and shall choose the path of social justice ... , the path of faith, the path of hope, and the path of love toward our fellow man.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#76. A nation, like a person, has a mind - a mind that must be kept informed and alert, that must know itself, that understands the hopes and needs of its neighbors - all the other nations that live within the narrowing circle of the world
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#77. If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other. The general raising of the standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half ce
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#78. The only thing we have to fear is a giant wheelchair-crushing squid. Well ... uh ... actually, I guess that's the only thing I have to fear.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#79. Until Henry Ford saw the chance to get free publicity (making Sub-chasers) he thought submarines were something to eat.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#80. It will never be possible for any length of time for any group of the American people, either by reason of wealth or learning or inheritance or economic power, to retain any mandate, any permanent authority to arrogate to itself the political control of American public life.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#81. Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#82. In the formative days of the Republic, the directing influence the Bible exercised upon the fathers of the Nation is conspicuously evident ...
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#83. For every advance that the Japanese have made since they started their frenzied career of conquest, they have had to pay a very heavy toll in warships, in transports, in planes, and in men. They are feeling the effects of those losses.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#84. We must open our eyes and see that modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with thelives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and out of it.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#85. In the field of world policy; I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#86. They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a peoples Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#87. We cannot always build a future for our youth, but we can always build our youth for the future.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#89. Dec. 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy -
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#90. We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#92. If you treat people right they will treat you right ... ninety percent of the time.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#93. There is one front and one battle where everyone in the United States-every man, woman, and child-is in action, and will be privileged to remain in action throughout this war. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives, and in our daily tasks.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#94. We may make mistakes-but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#95. Any Government, like any family, can for a year spend a little more than it earns. But you and I know that a continuation of that habit means the poorhouse.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#96. The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation .
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#98. I am perhaps being a bit facetious but if some of my good Baptist brethren in Georgia had done a little preaching from the pulpitagainst the K.K.K. in the '20s, I would have a little more genuine American respect for their Christianity!
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#99. The Social Security Act offers to all our citizens a workable and working method of meeting urgent present needs and of forestalling future need. It utilizes the familiar machinery of our Federal-State government to promote the common welfare and the economic stability of the Nation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#100. On both sides of the line, we are so accustomed to an undefended boundary three thousand miles long that we are inclined perhaps to minimize its vast importance, not only to our own continuing relations but also to the example which it sets to the other nations of the world.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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