Top 22 Quotes about Franklin Roosevelt

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.

I’ve been offered the role of Franklin Roosevelt, and I wouldn’t presume to undertake it.

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 was very concerned about environmental issues.

My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they’ll say something like, ‘Oh, didn’t he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?’ Well, that’s just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos.

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.

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.

I was born during the Depression in a little community just outside Waco, and I grew up listening to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio.

George Washington sets the nation on its democratic path. Abraham Lincoln preserves it. Franklin Roosevelt sees the nation through depression and war.

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

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.

And imagine where we’d be today if President Franklin Roosevelt had owned apartment buildings in Frankfurt and Berlin. You know, some of us might be speaking German.

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.

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

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.

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.

Ronald Reagan is clearly to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’

President Obama did something that no Democrat’s done since Franklin Roosevelt: that is, get a majority vote in Ohio twice. So I don’t really buy that his policy is that unpopular.

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.

Franklin Roosevelt was a great leader. He saw how to use the levers of power to affect change.

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.