Quotes About FDR

Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).

Of course, many have benefited from Social Security over the decades, especially the elderly. But the overall structure, which as Roosevelt insisted at the outset, put politics before economics, was and is, in the end, economically and fiscally irrational and irresponsible.

Historic American Buildings Survey—HABS for short—was one of FDR's greatest New Deal investments. Jobless folk fanned out across the country, seeking old buildings, photographing them and sketching their floor plans. Many of the structures they recorded in the 1930s were caught in the act of falling down. Some of them were documented in no other place.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt launched Social Security in 1935, he did not present it as expressing the mutual obligation of citizens to one another. ... Rather than offer a communal rationale, FDR argued that such rights were essential to "true individual freedom," adding, "necessitous men are not free men.

You know, in my hometown of Hope, Arkansas, the three sacred heroes were Jesus, Elvis, and FDR, not necessarily in that order.

My parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left.

But after a frustrated Franklin Roosevelt threatened to enlarge the high bench and pack it with his partisans, Justice Owen Roberts, in the infamous switch in time that saved nine, stopped finding New Deal legislation unconstitutional, so that 5–4 decisions against FDR became majority decisions allowing his schemes.

It was December 30, 1933, and the author of the Great Purge wined and dined Bullitt. At the end of a lovely evening together, FDR's new ambassador bade Stalin goodnight with a tender kiss on the cheek; the doting despot dutifully reciprocated.24

leaders of the Republican Party who declared that, thanks to FDR's appointment of many Jews to office, he was offering the public, not the New Deal but the Jew Deal.

But he also refused to issue a special order to let the refugee ship St. Louis land in the United States or even in the U.S. Virgin Islands, as offered by that territory's governor and legislative assembly and advocated by two members of FDR's cabinet.