Top 734 Franklin Roosevelt Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I am a huge admirer of Franklin Roosevelt's, and I believe social security has done untold good in alleviating the once-widespread issue of poverty among the elderly. FDR believed in the greatness and generosity of Americans - but he was also a cold-blooded politician.

From the end of Reconstruction through the civil rights revolution, the South was an almost uniformly Democratic region. In 1936, for example, Franklin Roosevelt won more than 98 percent of the vote in South Carolina.

I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism, uh, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John and Robert Kennedy - that's what the Democratic party ought to reach for.

It's easy to kick somebody when they're down. George W. Bush has dealt with more difficult issues than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. And I've told my colleagues it's time that we go stand up for the president.

It may seem ironic that the judicial branch preserves its legitimacy through refraining from action on political questions. That concept was put forward best by Justice [Felix] Frankfurter, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The promise of Social Security was reflected in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inter-generational compact that rewards hard work and provides retirement security.

Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about Franklin D. Roosevelt . A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.

I think Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he sort of watched him with a certain awe. He was afraid of Roosevelt's influence in the world.

I have a strong memory of the day I was told that my father had a weak heart and that he had to go to the hospital. He died when I was nine years old on the same day that Franklin Roosevelt died; it was his 45th birthday.

Even when you go up ramp, and you think about [Franklin D. Roosevelt] wheeling himself up, you know, got a little cigarette holder in his mouth, and it, that, that awe that you feel, that reverence that you feel for the place never entirely leaves.

[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times.

In this country kings or dukes don't amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the President; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres.

My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.

You have never seen greatness in a Presidency; I have. It was a rich kid who you would think had every reason to be a horse's ass - Franklin Roosevelt. He was humane and wise and resourceful. He was called a traitor to his class. With George Bush, that charge would never stick.

Franklin Roosevelt said the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance to those who have much; it is whether we provide enough to those who have too little. This reconciliation package fails that test as well.

Franklin Roosevelt ran on a balanced budget in 1932, and the greatest president, certainly, of the 20th century. So the idea that you lay out a predicate right now, Donald Trump has recreated the Republican Party in his image.

As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt learned when he tried to pack the Supreme Court, the three branches of government are coequal for a reason. Neither the executive branch or the legislative branch should use the third branch to a pursue a partisan agenda.

When he [Franklin Roosevelt] ultimately does not get the Republican Party nomination and decides to start his new Bull Moose Party, he does, for the first time, let black delegates be part of the party from elsewhere in the country.

I was a sailor. I was torpedoed, spent two weeks in a lifeboat. I was on the Murmansk run; I worked a 20 mm. machine gun, helped bring down a Stuka, all that kind of stuff. I've got letters from Franklin Roosevelt for things I did then. But those kind of credentials didn't work for you in the Cold War.

Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.

When I look at Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, I think the most important quality he had during the Depression and the war was this absolute confidence in himself, in his country, really in the American people. He was able to exude that confidence and almost project it.

Ben Franklin was a little stout later in life and it was said that in Paris a young woman, tapping him on his protruding abdomen, said,"Dr. Franklin, if this were on a woman, we'd know what to think." And Franklin replied,"Half an hour ago, Mademoiselle, it was on a woman, and now what do you think?"

Franklin Roosevelt had to govern at a time of crisis. If you're going to make changes in the way a nation thinks, you have to have the ability to take the crisis of the moment and use it to shape an agenda.

Hoovers didn't like Democrats because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's libelous partisan attacks on my great-grandfather Herbert Hoover, tethering him to the Great Depression.

You have never seen greatness in a Presidency; I have. It was a rich kid who you would think had every reason to be a horse's ass - Franklin Roosevelt. He was humane and wise and resourceful. He was called a traitor to his class.

Social class means a hell of a lot and upper class people - no matter how well [Franklin ] Roosevelt did - it was stylish to hate him.

I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.

Republican isolationists had certainly tied the hands of every U.S. president, year after year - berating Franklin Roosevelt in particular and his attempts to ready the nation for inevitable attack.

Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, others, knew how to lead. They knew how to ask the American people for the right things.

Both 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.

The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.

The measure of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether, as Franklin Roosevelt said, we provide enough for those who have too little.

The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity.

I'd give Donald Trump an "F." This has been the worst 100-day transition in my lifetime. And I was born during Franklin D. Roosevelt's term. This White House is by far the worst-run I have ever seen, certainly in modern times.

In Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known - and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.

Director Ken Burns revealed that his next documentary is about Franklin Roosevelt, and it's fourteen hours long...which sounds like too much, until you realize there's been over thirty hours of TV dedicated to Honey Boo Boo.

Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

We can see beyond the present shadows of war in the Middle East to a new world order where the strong work together to deter and stop aggression. This was precisely Franklin Roosevelt's and Winston Churchill's vision for peace for the post-war period.

If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.

Effective leaders at a high level tend to be skilled actors. Franklin Roosevelt is said to have to quipped, on being introduced to Orson Welles, that they were the two greatest actors in America. The story may be apocryphal, but the message rings true.

Politicians have done some grim things in pursuit of the office. President Franklin Roosevelt was a philanderer; nevertheless, he pushed aides to use his opponent Wendell Wilkie's affairs to hurt him. He even tutored aides on how to spread rumors without getting caught.

But he [Franklin Roosevelt] specifically prohibits any black participation from the Deep South, something which just infuriates people who'd been his supporters and who'd believed in him and resides that he is just shockingly abandoned the right of the people to rule. It's a pretty horrible story in that respect.

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.

Leaders such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and others promulgated a vision and a moving story of how their people could achieve a great purpose.

Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.

In his State of the Union speech in January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt declared America's commitment to Four Freedoms in the struggle against Nazi totalitarianism. Among them was the freedom from fear.

What Franklin Roosevelt did, which really offended them, was he strengthened the labor unions - made it possible for them to strike. The oligarchs were furious because the working class was not supposed to have any power at all.

Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.

Franklin Roosevelt didn't poll, because he had great political instincts. Now we have polls; we don't need instincts. But is that a change in principle? Is it a change in principle that we use a Xerox instead of carbon paper? It's of the same order of magnitude.

The crisis [the Great Depression] discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt...None too soon he has carried America forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His New Deal involves such collective controls of the national business that it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist days against that word...Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos.

The government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.

For a generation, Republicans have tried to unravel the activist government under which Americans have lived since the 1930s, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure.

Since Social Security was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 to ensure economic security for American workers, poverty among American seniors has dramatically declined.

My father was a Republican, and he couldn't stand what Franklin Delano Roosevelt was doing to the country. I always say I'm a mean-spirited narrow-minded right-wing, conservative Christian ... I start out with that, and if you don't like it, you can lump it. I am not politically correct.

Franklin [D. Roosevelt] had a good way of simplifying things. He made people feel that he had a real understanding of things and they felt they had about the same understanding.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.

In the Munich agreement in late 1938 [Franklin] Roosevelt sent his chief adviser Sumner Welles, who came back with a very supportive statement saying that Hitler was someone we could really do business with and so on.

When the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt thrust him suddenly into the Presidency in April of 1945 at one of the most critical moments of our history, he met that moment with courage and vision. His farsighted leadership in the postwar era has helped ever since to preserve peace and freedom in the world.

My parents were Orthodox Jews but not very regular Orthodox Jews. I was bar mitzvahed and all that. But God was hardly ever mentioned in my family. Franklin D. Roosevelt was.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became the greatest liberal leader of 20th century United States, but he started as a fiscal conservative. His greatness is founded in his willingness to change his mind to save his country from the Great Depression.