Franklin D. Roosevelt

The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

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.

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

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 who have little.

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion.

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.

Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force.

First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

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.

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.

War is a contagion.

Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.