Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes

“This nation asks for action, and action now.”

“For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government . . . costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching.”

“The forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

“I believe that we are going to get along very well with him [Josef Stalin] and the Russian people - very well indeed.”

“No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”

“All work undertaken should be useful - not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the Nation.”

“The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of America is grounded in principles and not on any single personality.”

“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 mustn't suffer from being wrong. That's what kills people like us.”

“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator's power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”

“Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labors.”

“It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.”

“Those (who) seek to establish systems of Government based on the regimentation of all Human Beings by a handful of individual rulers...call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.”

“Go for the moon. If you don't get it, you'll still be heading for a star. Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of the creative effort.”

“We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”

“If you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you.”

“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.”

“We cannot always build a future for our youth, but we can always build our youth for the future.”

“The true conservative is the man who has a real concern for injustices and takes thought against the day of reckoning.”

“All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.”

“Old women are the secret to the fluffiest cakes.”

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson - and I am not wholly excepting the Administration of W. W. The country is going through a repetition of Jackson's fight with the Bank of the United States - only on a far bigger and broader basis.”

“People die, but books never die.”

“Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”

“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”

“Remember you are just an extra in everyone else's play.”