Quotes By Franklin Roosevelt

Yes, we are on our way back - not just by pure chance, my friends, not just by a turn of the wheel, of the cycle. We are coming back more soundly than ever before because we are planning it that way. Don't let anybody tell you differently.

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

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

If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own.

If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free.

If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.

Let us not be afraid to help each other - let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

We have undertaken a new order of things; yet we progress to it under the framework and in the spirit and intent of the American Constitution.

In most Nations social justice, no longer a distant ideal, has become a definite goal, and ancient Governments are beginning to heed the call.

The American people do not stand alone in the world in their desire for change. We seek it through tested liberal traditions, through processes which retain all of the deep essentials of that republican form of representative government first given to a troubled world by the United States.

We find our population suffering from old inequalities, little changed by vast sporadic remedies.

In spite of our efforts and in spite of our talk, we have not weeded out the over privileged and we have not effectively lifted up the underprivileged. Both of these manifestations of injustice have retarded happiness.

No wise man has any intention of destroying what is known as the profit motive; because by the profit motive we mean the right by work to earn a decent livelihood for ourselves and for our families.

We have, however, a clear mandate from the people, that Americans must forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well.

We do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him and his a proper security, a reasonable leisure, and a decent living throughout life, is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.