Top 350 Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you have spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, everything else seems easy.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

52. “Necessitous men are not free men.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

53. “The real safeguard of democracy is education.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

54. “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

55. “Do something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

56. “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

57. “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

58. “The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

59. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

60. “No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

61. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

62. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

63. “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

64. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

65. “When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries is in danger.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

66. “I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

67. “We have nothing to fear but missing our massage appointment time.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

68. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

69. “Peace, like charity, begins at home.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

71. “Peace, like war, can succeed only where there is a will to enforce it, and where there is available power to enforce it.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

72. “Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

73. “Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

74. “Tell that to the Marines!”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

75. “To carry adequate life insurance is a moral obligation incumbent upon the great majority of citizens.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

76. “I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

77. “The forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

78. “Inquisitiveness is the most useful talent.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

79. “The ablest man I ever met is the man you think you are.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

80. “Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

81. “The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

82. “Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

83. “The first twelve years are the hardest.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

84. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

85. “It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead – and find no one there.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

86. “We may make mistakes-but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

87. “Every time an artist dies, part of the vision of mankind passes with him.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

88. “Happiness is not merely money, which is fun for effort and achievement.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

89. “Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

90. “They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

92. “The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate. Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred...”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

93. “I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people and that I have been given their trust.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

94. “Hitler built a fortress around Europe, but he forgot to put a roof on it.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

95. “A good leader can’t get too far ahead of his followers.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

96. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

98. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

99. “Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

100. “Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt