Top 100 The Roosevelt Quotes
#1. My dad came out of the Roosevelt era and the Depression. One person and one party made a difference in his life. That's what everybody forgot when they called my father and other people political bosses.
Richard M. Daley
#2. There have been two periods in my lifetime when the excitement of government and of public issues drew to Washington many of the bright young people graduating from colleges and law schools. These were essentially the Roosevelt and the Kennedy years.
Katharine Graham
#3. Born in the silent era, with the first ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Roosevelt Hotel, the Oscars are a tradition in a business that doesn't have much of it, and the biggest spectacle in a business that's often nothing but.
Steve Erickson
#4. The Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!
Arthur Hertzberg
#5. When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.
George Packer
#6. During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson's group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt's sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson.
Robert Dallek
#8. Avoid the base hypocrisy of condemning in one man what you pass over in silence when committed by another.
Theodore Roosevelt
#9. There will be some one at the White House whom you will like more than me," Roosevelt had predicted during his final meeting with the press corps, "but not one who will interest you more.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#10. 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
#11. What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#12. 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
#13. All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#14. Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood - the virtues that made America.
Theodore Roosevelt
#15. I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing is very permanent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#16. Teddy Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax. If I am sitting pretty and you've got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can't, what's the big deal for me to say, 'I'm going to pay a little bit more'? That is neighborliness.
Barack Obama
#18. As Americans, we go forward, in the service of our country, by the will of God.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#19. There is a widespread understanding among the people of this nation, and probably among the people of the world, that there is no safety except through the prevention of war.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#20. Personally I have never been able to understand why the head of a big business, whether it be the Nation, the State or the Army, or Navy should not desire to have very strong and positive people under him.
Theodore Roosevelt
#21. The function of Government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#22. Goods produced under conditions which do not meet a rudimentary standard to decency should be regarded as contraband and not allowed to pollute the channels of international commerce.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#23. I highly venerate the Masonic Institution, under the fullest persuasion that, when its principles are acknowledged and its laws and precepts obeyed, it comes nearest to the Christian religion, in its moral effects and influence, of any institution with which I am acquainted.
Theodore Roosevelt
#24. The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided, but NEVER hit softly.
Theodore Roosevelt
#25. To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.
Theodore Roosevelt
#26. Dating back to Teddy Roosevelt, hunters have been the pillar of conservation in America, doing more than anyone to conserve wildlife and its habitat.
Gale Norton
#27. 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
#28. Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#29. There are a few obvious consequences and perhaps one subtle possibility. One obvious thing is that, to stimulate the economy, President Obama has committed to creating millions of green jobs that will leave a legacy - much as Roosevelt's public works did during the new deal.
Denis Hayes
#30. The traditional Jeffersonian principle of religious freedom was so broadly democratic that it included the right to have no religion at all - it gave to the individual the right to worship any God he chose or no god.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#31. The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before.
Theodore Roosevelt
#32. Nothing should be permitted to stand in the way of the preservation of the forests, and it is criminal to permit individuals to purchase a little gain for themselves through the destruction of forests when this destruction is fatal to the well-being of the whole country in the future.
Theodore Roosevelt
#33. We know that enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#34. I think Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he sort of watched him with a certain awe. He was afraid of Roosevelt's influence in the world.
W. Averell Harriman
#35. The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack.
Theodore Roosevelt
#36. I think Eleanor Roosevelt's so popular at Allenswood because it's the first time she is, number one, free. But it's the first time somebody really recognizes her own leadership abilities and her own scholarly abilities.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#37. I met senators, diplomats and the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Jean Craighead George
#39. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.
Theodore Roosevelt
#40. From the very beginning our people have markedly combined practical capacity for affairs with power of devotion to an ideal. The lack of either quality would have rendered the other of small value.
Theodore Roosevelt
#41. The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.
Theodore Roosevelt
#42. The name 'United Nations' was Franklin D. Roosevelt's idea. He rushed to tell Winston Churchill, who was towelling himself stark naked in his bathroom.
John Lloyd
#43. No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.
Theodore Roosevelt
#44. Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
Walter Lippmann
#45. Miss Volker," I said about as politely as I knew how, "do you think you will outlast the rest of these original people?" "I have to," she said. "I made a promise to Eleanor Roosevelt to see them to their graves, and I can't drop dead on the job - so let's get going.
Jack Gantos
#46. 'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.
Theodore Roosevelt
#47. Sometimes it is extremely good for you to forget that there is anything in the world which needs to be done, and to do some particular thing that you want to do. Every human being needs a certain amount of time in which he can be peaceful.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#49. The wildlife and its habitat cannot speak, so we must and we will.
Theodore Roosevelt
#51. 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
#52. Franklin [D. Roosevelt] had a good way of simplifying things. He made people feel that he had a real understanding of things and they felt they had about the same understanding.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#53. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.
Theodore Roosevelt
#54. The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#55. He [Roosevelt] has made some speeches that indicate that he is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House, and has proposed a program which is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Constitution.
William Howard Taft
#56. If it's a man's game so decidedly that a woman would be soiled by entering it, then there is something radically wrong with the American game of politics.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#57. The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.
A.E. Samaan
#58. It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.
Randall Wallace
#59. Let us show, not merely in great crises, but in every day of life, qualities of practical intelligence, of hardihood and endurance, and above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal.
Theodore Roosevelt
#60. We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#61. A serf-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#62. More and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary the nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures.
Theodore Roosevelt
#63. We want the active and zealous help of every man far-sighted enough to realize the importance from the standpoint of the nation's welfare in the future of preserving the forests.
Theodore Roosevelt
#65. The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken in by party labels and thought the Democrats should be given a chance to show what they had up their sleeve.
Mary McCarthy
#66. It is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty, and intelligence.
Theodore Roosevelt
#67. For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda.
Ron Fournier
#68. This isn't just about today, this about generations to come. And you've got a chance to be the greatest conservation President since Theodore Roosevelt, and I think he's done it.
Bruce Babbitt
#69. I made one great mistake in my life-when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made but there was some justification-the danger that the Germans would make them.
Albert Einstein
#70. We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#71. You achieve strength, braveness and confidence by each experience in which you really halt to search dread during the deal with
Eleanor Roosevelt
#72. In time of this grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#73. Far-seeing patriots should turn scornfully from men who seek power on a platform which with exquisite nicety combines silly inability to understand the national needs and dishonest insintcerity in promising conflicting and impossible remedies.
Theodore Roosevelt
#74. A President has a great chance; his position is almost that of a king and a prime minister rolled into one. Once he has left office he cannot do very much; and he is a fool if he fails to realize it all and to be profoundly thankful for having had the great chance.
Theodore Roosevelt
#76. There is no reason why one should believe you should leave out politicians in cricket or any sport for that matter. There are ways and means in which government can assist in the management and development of players.
Roosevelt Skerrit
#77. On August 28, 1933, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6260, outlawing the constitutional right of U.S. citizens to own gold.
Michael Maloney
#78. Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint after-glow of the red sunset filled the west.
Theodore Roosevelt
#79. It is better for the Government to help a poor man to make a living for his family than to help a rich man make more profit for his company.
Theodore Roosevelt
#80. The Nazi danger to our Western world has long ceased to be a mere possibility. The danger is here now
not only from a military enemy but from an enemy of all law, all liberty, all morality, all religion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#81. All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed ... and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the I.R.S.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#82. I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do ...
Eleanor Roosevelt
#83. We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.
Theodore Roosevelt
#84. I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope - the door of opportunity - is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.
Theodore Roosevelt
#85. I was born during the Depression in a little community just outside Waco, and I grew up listening to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio.
Ann Richards
#86. Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. "Do not answer Bryan; attack him!" he counseled in early September, adding, "Don't let him make the issues.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#88. Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high purpose. Power undirected by high purpose spells calamity, and high purpose by itself is utterly useless if the power to put it into effect is lacking.
Theodore Roosevelt
#89. 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
#90. We should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt today as the greatest commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in our history, bar none - including President Lincoln.
Nigel Hamilton
#91. Norway ... looked to Roosevelt as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe ... It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.
Edmund Morris
#92. I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes hills and streams and plains the mountains over our land and nature's wealth deep under the earth are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#93. Thanks to Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, we are now living under a system where the president is forced to step in to stop a regulatory agency from promulgating regulations that Congress refused to enact.
Andrew P. Napolitano
#94. The most difficult place in the world to get a clear and open perspective of the country as a whole is Washington.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#95. I kept praying that I might be able to prevent a repetition of this stupidity called war. I have tried to keep the promise I made to myself, but the progress that the world is making toward peace seems like the crawling of a little child, very halting and slow.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#96. Father is strength at home, strength in government and strength overseas. Mother represents upbringing, education, the spread of civilization. Children are the lower classes, the lower races, to be brought to maturity and then set free
Theodore Roosevelt
#97. Abraham Lincoln - the spirit incarnate of those who won victory in the Civil War - was the true representative of this people, not only for his own generation, but for all time, because he was a man among men.
Theodore Roosevelt
#99. America is not a pile of goods, more luxury, more comforts, a better telephone system, a greater number of cars. America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average man and, if we can not obtain it, all our other
achievements amount to nothing.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#100. Enjoy every minute you have with those you love, my dear, for no one can take joy that is past away from you. It will be there in your heart to live on when the dark days come.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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