Quotes By Franklin D. Roosevelt

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else's play.

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.

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.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union.

One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.

To reach a port, we must sail - sail, not tie at anchor - sail, not drift.

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.

Confidence... thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.

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

Be sincere; be brief; be seated.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

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.

No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.

When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

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.

Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.

Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.

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.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

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.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

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.