Top 350 Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States in these past few weeks. Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

202. “Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

203. “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

204. “New ideas can be good and bad, just the same as old ones.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

205. “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power... Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

206. “It is to the real advantage of every producer, every manufacturer and every merchant to cooperate in the improvement of working conditions, because the best customer of American industry is the well-paid worker.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

208. “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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Featured in: Reading Quotes

212. “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

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

218. “I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

219. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

224. “Taxation according to income is the most effective instrument yet devised to obtain just contribution from those best able to bear it and to avoid placing onerous burdens upon the mass of our people.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

232. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

236. “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

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

238. “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

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

243. “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

244. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

245. “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

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

248. “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

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

250. “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