Quotes to inspire and reflect

The man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic, the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.

Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential.

Second, they desire to seek no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.

Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.

[ Of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza :] He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.

First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.

[ Referring to his dog :] Fala’s Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.

Poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.

On this tenth day of June 1940 the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted—in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest . . . of his head.

Modern complexities call also for a constant infusion of new blood in the courts, just as it is needed in executive functions of the Government and in private business. A lowered mental or physical vigor leads men to avoid an examination of complicated and changed conditions. Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or to inquire into the present or the future.

[ On the “court-packing plan” increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices :] This plan will save our national Constitution from hardening of the judicial arteries.

Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. . . . 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.

The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.

I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation [the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935].

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

The first theory is that if we make the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us. The second theory . . . was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure, their prosperity will rise upward . . . through the ranks.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

You will find that [as the First Lady] you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument.

[ Of Alfred E. Smith :] He is the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield.

All of us in this country give lip service to the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights and emphasized by every additional amendment, and yet when war is stirring in the world, many of us are ready to curtail our civil liberties. We do not stop to think that curtailing these liberties may in the end bring us a greater danger than the danger we are trying to avert.

A woman will always have to be better than a man in any job she undertakes.

Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, ma Dame ,

Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie .

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

This intimate alliance—which for me makes the true man—of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will.

Civilization and Its Discontents.

It’s been so long since I made love I can’t even remember who gets tied up.

Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets!

[ Catchphrase :] Can we talk?

I have bathed in the Poem

Elle est retrouvée .

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

JE est un autre .

Beauty is nothing

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

Don’t

Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn’t inhale.

We are, I am, you are

The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

I put on

I stroke the beam of my lamp

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,