Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes

“The loneliest feeling in the world is when you think you are leading the parade and turn to find that no one is following you. No president who badly misguesses public opinion will last very long.”

“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”

“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.”

“Private enterprise is ceasing to be free enterprise.”

“Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self reliant enough to be free.”

“We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.”

“No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.”

“I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.”

“Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself.”

“The frontier of America is on the Rhine.”

“More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between Governments. The once powerful malignant Nazi state is crumbling; the Japanese warlords are receiving in their homelands the retribution for which they asked when they attacked Pearl Harbor. But the mere conquest of our enemies is not enough; we must go on to do all in our power to conquer the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed, which made this horror possible.”

“Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can't even lift them.”

“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.”

“The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.”

“[M]y conception of liberty does not permit an individual citizen or a group of citizens to commit acts of depredation against nature in such a way as to harm their neighbors and especially to harm the future generations of Americans. If many years ago we had had the necessary knowledge, and especially the necessary willingness on the part of the Federal Government, we would have saved a sum, a sum of money which has cost the taxpayers of America two billion dollars.”

“We are going to tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.”

“It has always seemed to me that the best symbol of common sense was a bridge.”

“When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.”

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.”

“There are as many opinions as there are experts.”

“I want to preach a new doctrine. A complete separation of business and government.”

“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.”

“America has been the New World in all tongues, to all peoples, not because this continent was a new-found land, but because all those who came here believed they could create upon this continent a new life -- a life that should be new in freedom.”

“Change is like fire- if uncontrolled, it will consume us.”

“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.”

“Since I am used to speaking in public, I know that it is useless.”

“Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men.”

“But the challenge is always the same - whether each generation facing its own circumstances can summon the practical devotion to attain and retain that greatest good for the greatest number which this government of the people was created to ensure.”

“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.”

“I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.”

“I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

“The hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth.”

“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.”

“Do Something.If it works, do more of it.If it doesn't,do something else.”

“Among American citizens, there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races.”

“Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.”

“Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion.”

“The American People in their Righteous Might will win through to Absolute Victory.”

“We can afford all that we need; but we can not afford all [that] we want.”

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering”

“Books cannot be killed by fire.”

“Freedom of conscience, of education, of speech, of assembly are among the very fundamentals of democracy and all of them would be nullified should freedom of the press ever be successfully challenged.”

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

“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.”

“It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.”

“A program whose basic thesis is, not that the system of free enterprise for profit has failed in this generation, but that it has not yet been tried!”

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred.”

“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...”

“Sometimes the best way to keep peace in the family is to keep the members of the family apart for awhile.”

“These are bad days for all of us who remember always that when real world forces come into conflict, the final result is never as dark as we mortals guess it in very difficult days.”