Fdr Quotes

“It isn't sufficient just to want - you've got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Conventional belief holds that after triumphing over a mid-career bout with polio, FDR went on to serve two vigorous terms as gov- ernor of New York and three-plus more as president of the United States, succumbing unexpectedly to a stroke on April 12, 1945. In truth, Franklin spent those eventful twenty-four years battling swarms of maladies including polio’s ongoing crippling effects, life-threatening gastrointestinal bleeding, two incurable cancers, severe cardiovascular disease, and epilepsy.”
― Steven Lomazow, FDR Unmasked: 73 Years of Medical Cover-ups That Rewrote History

“Talkativeness and charm are both, as is well-known, characteristics somewhat feminine; and they often add up to guile. Certainly there was a strong streak of the female in Roosevelt, though this is not to disparage his essential masculinity. Confidence in his own charm led him into occasional perilous adventures—almost as a woman may be persuaded with a long series of glittering successes behind her, to think she is irresistible forever and can win anybody's scalp.”
― John Gunther, Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History

“Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Mr. Roosevelt liked to be liked. He courted and wooed people. He had good taste, an affable disposition, and profound delight in people and human relationships. This was probably the single most revealing of all his characteristics; it was both a strength and a weakness, and is a clue to much. To want to be liked by everybody does not merely mean amiability; it connotes will to power, for the obvious reason that if the process is carried on long enough and enough people like the person, his power eventually becomes infinite and universal. Conversely, any man with great will to power and sense of historical mission, like Roosevelt, not only likes to be liked; he has to be liked, in order to feed his ego. But FDR went beyond this; he wanted to be liked not only by contemporaries on as broad a scale as possible, but by posterity. This, among others, is one reason for his collector's instinct. He collected himself—for history. He wanted to be spoken of well by succeeding generations, which means that he had the typical great man's wish for immortality, and hence—as we shall see in a subsequent chapter—he preserved everything about himself that might be of the slightest interest to historians. His passion for collecting and cataloguing is also a suggestive indication of his optimism. He was quite content to put absolutely everything on the record, without fear of what the world verdict of history would be.”
― John Gunther, Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History

“Charm has an occasional contrary concomitant, heartlessness. The virtuoso is so pleased by the way he produces his effects that he disregards the audience. Once Dorothy Thompson came in to see FDR after a comparatively long period of having been snubbed by the White House—although she had deserted Wilkie for Roosevelt during the campaign just concluded, and as a result had been fired from The New York Herald Tribune, the best job she ever had. Roosevelt greeted her with the remark, "Dorothy, you lost your job, but I kept mine—ha, ha!”
― John Gunther, Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History

“No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“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 was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR: Selected Speeches of President Franklin D. Roosevelt

“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.”
― Randall Wallace, Pearl Harbor

“If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts.”
― David Brin

“Early survey researchers noted in 1936 that 83% of Republicans believed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies were leading the country down the road to dictatorship, a view shared by only 9% Democrats.”
― Bradley Palmquist, Partisan Hearts and Minds

“Returning to Washington,FDR declared that Yalta Conference had put and end to the kind of balance-of-power divisions that had long marred global politics. His assessment echoed Woodrow Wilson's idealistic and equally inaccurate claims at the end of World War I. In London, Churchill told his cabinet that "poor Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin." Soviet-British friendship, Churchill maintained, "would continue as long as Stalin was in charge.”
― Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948

“We hear things like “we elected a black president,” as if that event was the magic eraser to wipe away all of the racial problems in our country in one fell swoop.

But that would be like saying that in 1932, we elected a president with a physical disability, so we should stop building ramps and having reserved handicap spaces because that’s reverse discrimination against the able-bodied”
― Simon S. Tam

“When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn’t agreeing with you. He’s just listening to you.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“A good story is sometimes preferable to an accurate one.”
― Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“And by laying the groundwork for a system centered on home ownership rather than the public housing popular in Europe, the New Deal made possible the great postwar housing boom that populated the Sun Belt and boosted millions of Americans into the middle class, where, ironically, they often became Republicans.”
― Jonathan Alter

“In the spring of 1931, West African natives in the Cameroons sent New York $3.77 for relief for the "starving"; that fall Amtorgs's new York office received 100,000 applications for job in Soviet Russia. On a single weekend in April, 1932, the 'Ile de france' and other transatlantic liner carried nearly 4,000 workingmen back to Europe; in June, 500 Rhode Island aliens departed for Mediterranean ports.”
― William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940

“[FDR] Roosevelt did issue an important executive order in 1941 creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to combat discrimination in the defense industry, which avoided a threatened march on Washington led by the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. With Roosevelt’s death, on April 12 1945, and the assumption of the presidency by Vice President Harry Truman, civil rights leaders hoped that the new leader might be more willing to publicly embrace their cause.”
― Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring

“An irrational fear is just as scary if not scarier than one that’s justified. FDR said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ yet he was actually deathly afraid of the number thirteen.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“There are as many opinions as there are experts.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“In Chicago [during the Great Depression], a crowd of some fifty hungry men fought over barrel of garbage set outside the back door of restaurant”
― William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940

“FDR appointed a eugenic zealot named Isiah Bowman to his "M Project" that kept Jews from the safety of US shores.”
― A.E. Samaan, H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator

“MENS REA”:
On January 16, 1944, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and one of his deputies, Randolph Paul, personally visited the President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to coerce him to finally act and do something to help refugees escaping The Holocaust. More diplomatic efforts had failed, so Morgenthau's approach strengthened. The report brought to the President reveals a desperate and necessary act to coerce a response from an administration that was systematically and overtly preventing both private and official help for the victims escaping Hitler. The report documents a pattern of attempts by the State Department to obstruct rescue opportunities and block the flow of Holocaust information to the United States. Morgenthau warned that the refugee issue had become “a boiling pot on [Capitol] Hill,” and Congress was likely to pass the rescue resolution if faced with a White House unwilling to act. Roosevelt understood the deep implications and pre-empted Congress by establishing the War Refugee Board. The result was “Executive Order 9417” creating the War Refugee Board, issued on January 22, 1944.”
― A.E. Samaan, From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848

“President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was born in 1882, was considered a hero in Jersey City, although I don’t think that my parents saw him that way. He was born in Dutchess County, NY to a prominent Dutch family and, much later, when I lived in Pawling, New York, I got to know his son, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. What I remember most vividly, was walking up and down Nelson Avenue on April 12, 1945, announcing that the President had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. I was not yet eleven years old when I followed the details of the transfer of power to Harry S. Truman, who succeeded him to the presidency. Over a year had passed since American troops had landed in Italy and started reclaiming Europe. Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered to the Allies a few days later on May 7, 1945, freeing me from the unfounded suspicion of being a Nazi and part of the evil empire in the eyes of my schoolmates.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One"

“Like Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, Jefferson kept his intimate feelings hidden from the public, either in triumph or in crisis.”
― Fawn Brodie

“Near the end of his life, Franklin Roosevelt said, "We have learned we cannot live alone, in peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations, far away. We have learned that we must live as men, and not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community."

The American people, in general, had learned no such things. They had learned that the oceans were shrinking, and that demons who had seemed far away in 1941 could be dangerous. It was not a sense of responsibility, but the shock of fPearl Harbor that brought the United States out into the world. If Americans had suddenly become the watchmen on the walls of freedom, it had been caused by necessity, never by choice.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach

“In this determination to live at peace among ourselves we in the Americas make it at the same time clear that we stand shoulder to shoulder in our final determination that others who, driven by war madness or land hunger, might seek to commit acts of aggression against us will find a Hemisphere wholly prepared to consult together for our mutual safety and our mutual good.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, Buenos Aires, December 1936]”
― Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933-1945