Top 105 Roosevelt Quotes

There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson – real lows. And it’s never come back. It’s a trend that, if you’re liberal, is really discouraging.

I think Roosevelt had four terms, didn’t he? I think we should go back to that, and we should go back to four years for a senator, four years for a congressman, and I think we’d see a huge change in our society.

Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn’t work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won’t work for you either.

Teddy Roosevelt of course was a great outdoorsman all his life.

The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

My father’s political heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

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.

Donald Trump can take his message directly to the people via rallies and addresses carried over social media. I’d call them updated versions of Roosevelt’s fireside chats, but a portion of my younger readership doesn’t even know what a radio is thanks to a Democrat-run education system.

Every day, no matter how tired my father was, he’d put me in the car and drive me to Schaumburg Public Library, and he’d read to me from books about Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn’t know.

With the newspapers cheering, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt chose a top-notch regiment of more than 1,250 men. They were first called Teddy’s Texas Tarantulas and went through three or four other monikers until Roosevelt’s Rough Riders stuck.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth was only a few years older than my mother but outlived her by a decade, dying in 1980. From the time they met, in 1917, they were lifelong friends of sorts, though each was a bit wary of the other.

More than anything, I want to keep working with people of talent like Craig Gillespie, Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood. But there’s also those long-dreamt-of moments: I’d love to host ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I’d love to do a Penguin stand-alone movie at Warner Bros., I’d love to do a Teddy Roosevelt biopic.

The Atlantic conference in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland is a dramatic moment in World War II history because for the first time, Roosevelt and Churchill are meeting face to face in this war.

Can any of us even imagine, after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt suggesting we negotiate a resolution or that we could simply prosecute those involved? Of course it is unimaginable. We are right to be in the Middle East, and we are right to treat this as the war it is.

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.

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.

When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.

Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan each suffered through his second four years. FDR was checkmated by Congress and the Supreme Court. Ike was dogged by Sputnik and reckless charges that the United States suffered from a Missile Gap. Reagan had to wend his way through Iran-Contra.

The Rough Riders brought honor to San Antonio by winning battles in Cuba throughout the summer of 1898, and Roosevelt became a Texas folk hero overnight.

Theodore Roosevelt had been enthralled with the idea of Texas since 1883, when he arrived in the Dakota Territory to ranch cattle.

There have been two periods in my lifetime when the excitement of government and of public issues drew to Washington many of the bright young people graduating from colleges and law schools. These were essentially the Roosevelt and the Kennedy years.

My knowledge of the state of President Roosevelt’s health was derived entirely from conversations, from newspaper articles and from photographs.

If Roosevelt were alive today, he’d turn over in his grave.

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.

In truth, every American administration since that of Franklin D. Roosevelt has maintained close ties with the Saudi rulers, and for a single, simple reason: oil.

We should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt today as the greatest commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in our history, bar none – including President Lincoln.

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.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt faced adversities that, in their times, seemed impregnable. Great presidents overcome great odds.

For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don’t know that George Washington would be a president today, I don’t know that Abe Lincoln would, I don’t know that Roosevelt would.

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.

There’s a myth that Roosevelt gave Stalin Eastern Europe. I was with Roosevelt every day at Yalta.

I met senators, diplomats and the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I went to the Women’s Campaign School at Yale; I went to Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Training, women’s campaign fund training. I got to know the district really well by talking to the county chair, getting to know politics, working on some local races.

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 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.

Teddy Roosevelt is still a hero among environmentalists for his conservationist policies.

Historically, individuals possessed of the confidence that privilege and good fortune bestow have often proved conspicuous reformers: think only of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I think people really understand that clean air and clean water and not having factories dumping their emissions into the atmosphere and into the rivers and into the sea has been a very good thing for America. EPA stands watch for very important principles that go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt.

Our only president who has died as U.S. commander in chief in war is Franklin Delano Roosevelt – who died of a cerebral hemorrhage or massive stroke on April 12, 1945, only three weeks before the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces he had laid down as implacable Allied policy two years before.

In 1940, President Roosevelt called on American industry to become the ‘great arsenal of democracy.’ Automotive manufacturers in Michigan responded and converted their assembly lines from cars to tanks and helped America win World War II.

The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!

As a Polish American, I grew up hearing the phrase ‘nothing about us without us.’ To Eastern Europeans, the vow is a painful reminder of how Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt carved up their small countries after World War II, placing them, against their will, under Soviet domination.

I’m not comparing myself to Bobby Kennedy by any stretch, but he was opposed by the liberal establishment, too. Eleanor Roosevelt was the biggest opponent to him running.

John Kerry wants to be the hero in his own drama. He likes King Arthur and the Round Table. He likes the young swashbuckling Churchill, and he loved the early antics of Theodore Roosevelt.