Quotes About F.D.R.

The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I'm trying to undo the "Great Society." It was L.B.J.'s war on poverty that led to our present mess.

I am from an F.D.R. liberal-Democratic family. With proximity to government, I have become more libertarian.

The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln.

There will be trying times during Obama's presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don't think it worked then. It didn't solve any problems then and it hasn't solved any problems in 50 years.

F.D.R. had to deal with Southern segregationists - and outright racists - who held power in Congress, so he had to yield to that power in order to get his New Deal legislation passed.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.'s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs.

Lanny thought it was just as well that F.D.R. didn't have to undergo the ordeal of another interview with that hysterical Frenchman, who called himself a successor to Joan of Arc and whose mind had come straight out of that period of history.

The Army didn't know who its true friends were; it considered Socialists to be crackpots, just as they were called in America, and the people who knew how to get things done were the powerful ones at the top—the same who had hired the Nazi-Fascist gangsters to put down labor and keep political control in the hands of the well-born and well-to-do. F.D.R. himself understood this quite clearly; but how many in his administration understood it, and how many in Congress

There will be trying times during Obama's presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

F.D.R. had an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1933 when he drove 15 major bills through the Congress, and super majorities in the House and the Senate in 1935 when he won passage of Social Security.

Despite an unqualified understanding that U.S. national security was inextricably bound up with Britain's survival, F.D.R. knew that his reelection in part rested on the hope that he would keep the country out of war.