Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes About Liberty
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Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labors. If those taxes are excessive, they are reflected in idle factories, in tax-sold farms, and in hordes of hungry people, tramping the streets and seeking jobs in vain. Our workers may never see a tax bill, but they pay. They pay in deductions from wages, in increased cost of what they buy, or - as now - in broad unemployment throughout the land.
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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.
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It is a good thing to demand liberty for ourselves and for those who agree with us, but it is a better thing and a rarer thing to give liberty to others who do not agree with us.
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The Nazi danger to our Western world has long ceased to be a mere possibility. The danger is here now--not only from a military enemy but from an enemy of all law, all liberty, all morality, all religion.
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These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.
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The people of America are in agreement in defending their liberties at any cost, and the first line of that defense lies in the protection of economic security.
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Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom.
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It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. ...And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
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The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
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Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.
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History proves that dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments, but out of weak and helpless ones. If by democratic methods people get a government strong enough to protect them from fear and starvation, their democracy succeeds; but if they do not, they grow impatient. Therefore, the only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.
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For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government . . . costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching.
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The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the goverment.
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The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind - men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others - men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves.
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If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.
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Liberty requires opportunity to make a living--a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives a man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
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The lessons of religious toleration - a toleration which recognizes complete liberty of human thought, liberty of conscience - is one which, by precept and example, must be inculcated in the hearts and minds of all Americans if the institutions of our democracy are to be maintained and perpetuated. We must recognize the fundamental rights of man. There can be no true national life in our democracy unless we give unqualified recognition to freedom of religious worship and freedom of education.
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We are going to tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.
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My own party can succeed at the polls only so long as it continues to be the party of militant liberalism.
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The liberal party is a party which believes that, as new conditions an problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of the government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them.
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They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a peoples Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.
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[M]y conception of liberty does not permit an individual citizen or a group of citizens to commit acts of depredation against nature in such a way as to harm their neighbors and especially to harm the future generations of Americans. If many years ago we had had the necessary knowledge, and especially the necessary willingness on the part of the Federal Government, we would have saved a sum, a sum of money which has cost the taxpayers of America two billion dollars.
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If we do not halt this steady process of building commissions and regulatory bodies and the special legislation like huge inverted pyramids over every one of the simple constitutional provisions, we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more.
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Those (who) seek to establish systems of Government based on the regimentation of all Human Beings by a handful of individual rulers...call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.
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I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.
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To bring about government by oligarchy, masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our Federal government. . . The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed.
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A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Born: January 30, 1882
- Died: April 12, 1945
- Occupation: 32nd U.S. President
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