"All work undertaken should be useful -..." - Quote by Franklin D Roosevelt
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.
More by Franklin D Roosevelt
“The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
“I read in a newspaper that I was to be received with all the honors customarily rendered to a foreign ruler. I am grateful for the honors; but something within me rebelled at that word 'foreign'. I say this because when I have been in Canada, I have never heard a Canadian refer to an American as a 'foreigner'. He is just an 'American'. And, in the same way, in the United States, Canadians are not 'foreigners', they are 'Canadians'. That simple little distinction illustrates to me better than anything else the relationship between our two countries.”
“True wealth is not a static thing. It is a living thing made out of the disposition of men to create and distribute the good things of life with rising standards of living.”
More on Work
“Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like.”
“If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs.”
“If power doesn't mean that you have the opportunity to work with the people that you love , then you haven't really got any.”
More on Purpose
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
“Mozart, who was buried in a pauper’s grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.”
“It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.”