The hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth.
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.
This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
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.
No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.
We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said that the only way to have a friend is to be one. We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion or mistrust or with fear.
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 reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Peace, like war, can succeed only where there is a will to enforce it, and where there is available power to enforce it.
But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.
The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate. Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred...
I think this would be a good time for a beer.
Presidents are selected, not elected.
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.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
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.
No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.
Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.