Top 350 Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “We must be the great arsenal of Democracy.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

202. “We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

203. “I suggest a nationwide reading of the Holy Scriptures during the period from Thanksgiving Day to Christmas.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

204. “It is one of the characteristics of a free and democratic nation that it have free and independent labor unions.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

205. “Concentration of wealth and power has been built upon other people’s money, other people’s business, other people’s labor. Under this concentration, independent business has been a menace to American society.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

206. “It is the habit of the unthinking to turn to the illusions of economic magic. These unhappy times call for the building of plans that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

207. “Self-help and self-control are the essence of the American tradition.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

208. “In our democracy officers of the government are the servants, and never the masters of the people.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

209. “Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

210. “There’s nothing to fear but a wide receiver who can run a 100-yard dash in under 10 seconds.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

211. “Private enterprise is ceasing to be free enterprise.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

213. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

215. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

216. “The core of our defense is the faith we have in the institutions we defend.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

217. “A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted-in the air.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

218. “It is highly unlikely that an airplane, or fleet of them, could ever sink a fleet of Navy vessels under battle conditions.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

220. “I see one-third of a nation ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished... the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those that have too little.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

221. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

222. “Wise and prudent men and intelligent conservatives have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing time.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

223. “In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

224. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

225. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

226. “The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

227. “Private enterprise is ceasing to be free enterprise. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

228. “We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

230. “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

231. “The traditional Jeffersonian principle of religious freedom was so broadly democratic that it included the right to have no religion at all – it gave to the individual the right to worship any God he chose or no god.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

232. “So many figures are quoted to prove so many things. Sometimes it depends on what paper you read or what broadcast you listen in on.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

233. “I hope that your committee will not permit doubt as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

234. “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

235. “They have given their sons to the military services. They have stoked the furnaces and hurried the factory wheels. They have made the planes and welded the tanks. Riveted the ships and rolled the shells.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

236. “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

237. “We must open our eyes and see that modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with thelives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and out of it.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

238. “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!”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

239. “In the final analysis, the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind. Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

240. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

241. “Our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

242. “Coming to grips with the reality that our planet is not the only one harboring intelligent life the universe.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

243. “New Orleans makes it possible to go to Europe without ever leaving the United States.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

244. “The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic – have always blown on free men.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

245. “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

246. “The frontier of America is on the Rhine.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

247. “The constant free flow of communication amount us-enabling the free interchange of ideas-forms the very bloodstream of our nation. It keeps the mind and body of our democracy eternally vital, eternally young.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

248. “The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

249. “As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

250. “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt