Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes

“To some generations much is given. Of other generations, much is expected.”

“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.”

“If you have spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, everything else seems easy.”

“There is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion.”

“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”

“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, on my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks... but Fala does resent them.”

“The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic - have always blown on free men.”

“To stand upon ramparts and die for our principles is heroic, but to sally forth to battle and win for our principles is something more than heroic.”

“...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.”

“No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.”

“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.”

“We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions-bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities.”

“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.”

“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.”

“So many figures are quoted to prove so many things. Sometimes it depends on what paper you read or what broadcast you listen in on.”

“Peace can endure only so long as humanity really insists upon it, and is willing to work for it and sacrifice for it.”

“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation .”

“Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.”

“In the final analysis, the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind. Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.”

“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.”

“Be sincere; be brief; be seated.”

“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.”

“A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted-in the air.”

“To a great extent the achievements of invention, of mechanical and of artistic creation, must of necessity, and rightly, be individual rather than governmental. It is the self-reliant pioneer in every enterprise who beats the path along which American civilization has marched. Such individual effort is the glory of America.”

“In our seeking for economic and political progress, we all go up - or else we all go down.”