Quotes from Franklin D. Roosevelt

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another but above all try something.

Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him a satisfactory embodiment.

Great power involves great responsibility

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.

No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.

Too often in recent history liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy.

If you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you.

We must be the great arsenal of Democracy.

All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River

Confidence... thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.

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

Friendship among nations, as among individuals, calls for constructive efforts to muster the forces of humanity in order that an atmosphere of close understanding and cooperation may be cultivated.

The overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

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.

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.

In a democratic nation, power must be linked with responsibility, and obliged to defend and justify itself within the framework of the general good.

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

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.

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual a sense of his own dignity and teaches him to respect himself by respecting his neighbors.

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

The presidency is not merely an administrative office...It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

Frankly, I do not know how to effect a permanency in American foreign policy.