Franklin D Roosevelt on Wealth Quotes

"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."

"It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them."

"True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men."

"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation."

"I am not for a return to the prosperity of the 1920s... I am for a new prosperity."

"Widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot long endure side by side in a democracy."

"I believe that we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought."

"We are going to make a country in which no one is left out."

"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people."

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics."

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

"The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation... It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world."

"Our goal for the future is a very simple, a very practical, one. It is... a greater share in the good things of life for all of our people."

"I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few."

"The distribution of wealth is a problem that will not be settled by the simple process of taking from those who have and giving to those who have not."

"The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business."

"We cannot afford to be soft-headed. But we can afford to be soft-hearted."

"I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."

"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 we all go down, as one people."

"Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature can be as serious as the throwing out of balance of the resources of a bank."

"Economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings."

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself."

"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."

"Wealth is not the aim of life, but it is an instrument of life."

"There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

"The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man... are the lifeblood of our system."

"The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize."

"The basic principle of the New Deal is that the government has the definite duty to use all its resources and all its power... to protect the health and the happiness of the people."

"The forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid is the one who must be helped first."

"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort."

"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 too little."

"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths."

"Business was the first to ask the Government for help in 1933."