Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering

This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.

The people's community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy...Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must.

We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war. There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war. Also they make money out of it.

There is the great, silent, continuous struggle: the struggle between the State and the Individual; between the State which demands and the individual who attempts to evade such demands. Because the individual, left to himself, unless he be a saint or hero, always refuses to pay taxes, obey laws, or go to war.

War is a barbaric tool of the war profiteers and Empires who employ them. War pits young people from the working class against other similarly poor, or disadvantaged humans, for nothing but the greed of the few. Only we the people can make war obsolete by not participating in the profound crimes of the profiteers and other war mongers.

Our conflict is not likely to cease so soon as every good man would wish. The measure of iniquity is not yet filled; and unless we can return a little more to first principles, and act a little more upon patriotic ground, I do not know when it will-or-what may be the issue of the contest. Speculation-peculation-engrossing-forestalling-with all their concomitants, afford too many melancholy proofs of the decay of public virtue; and too glaring instances of its being the interest and desire of too many, who would wish to be thought friends, to continue the war.

They say great times make great men. I don't buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn't or wouldn't. Greed, fear, stupidity and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. [...] I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.

Simultaneously the Left Opposition in the course of several years carried on a struggle against the Stalinists in favor of collectivization.

To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).

I loved the old government in 1861. I loved the old Constitution yet. I think it is the best government in the world, if administered as it was before the war. I do not hate it; I am opposing now only the radical revolutionists who are trying to destroy it. I believe that party to be composed, as I know it is in Tennessee, of the worst men on Gods earth - men who would not hesitate at no crime, and who have only one object in view - to enrich themselves.

This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

The wars they will be fought again The holy dove be caught again bought and sold and bought again; the dove is never free.

You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than any one else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes been objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars.

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to affect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.

There is no time in American history in which there was more economic conflict between segments of the population than there was prior to the Civil War.

Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.

Technical Utopias-flying, for example-have been achieved by the new science of nature.The human utopia...a united new humankind living in solidarity and peace, free from economic determination and from war and class struggle-can be achieved, provided we spend the same energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm on the realization of the human Utopia as we have spent on the realization of our technical Utopias.

Social class means a hell of a lot and upper class people - no matter how well [Franklin ] Roosevelt did - it was stylish to hate him.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.