FDR

If we are willing to fight for peace now, is it not good logic that we should use force if necessary, in the future, to keep the peace?

Most of them are fighting for the attainment of peace--not just a truce, not just an armistice--but peace that is as strongly enforced and as durable as mortal man can make it.

The overwhelming majority of all the people in the world want peace.

Assuming that their motives were of the highest, events have shown how unwilling they were to face the facts.

There have always been cheerful idiots in this country who believed that there would be no more war for us, if everybody in America would only return into their homes and lock their front doors behind them.

No--that is putting it too weakly--it is my intention to do all that I humanly can as President and Commander-in-Chief to see to it that these tragic mistakes shall not be made again.

For too many years we lived on pious hopes that aggressor and warlike nations would learn and understand and carry out the doctrine of purely voluntary peace.

And today we salute our unseen Allies in occupied countries--the underground resistance groups and the armies of liberation.

It has been our steady policy--and it is certainly a common sense policy--that the right of each nation to freedom must be measured by the willingness of that nation to fight for freedom.

But, at the same time, we are agreed that if force is necessary to keep international peace, international force will be applied--for as long as it may be necessary.

The doctrine that the strong shall dominate the weak is the doctrine of our enemies--and we reject it.

The rights of every nation, large or small, must be respected and guarded as jealously as are the rights of every individual within our own republic.

But those four powers must be united with and cooperate with all the freedom-loving peoples of Europe, and Asia, and Africa and the Americas.

As long as these four nations with great military power stick together in determination to keep the peace there will be no possibility of an aggressor nation arising to start another world war.

Britain, Russia, China and the United States and their Allies represent more than three-quarters of the total population of the earth.

I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people--very well indeed.

In these conferences we were concerned with basic principles-- principles which involve the security and the welfare and the standard of living or human beings in countries large and small.

We wish them to have a normal chance to develop, in peace, as useful and respectable members of the European family.

The United Nations have no intention to enslave the German people.

We were united in determination that Germany must be stripped of her military might and be given no opportunity within the foreseeable future to regain that might.

He knows by practical and successful experience the way to coordinate air, sea and land power.

The Russian army will continue its stern offensives on Germany's Eastern front, the allied armies in Italy and Africa will bring relentless pressure on Germany from the south, and now the encirclement will be complete as great American and…

Today we and the Republic of China are closer together than ever before in deep friendship and in unity of purpose.

I met in the Generalissimo a man of great vision, great courage, and a remarkably keen understanding of the problems of today and tomorrow.

Our own Army and Navy, our Air Forces, the Australians and New Zealanders, the Dutch, and the British land, air and sea forces are all forming a band of steel which is slowly but surely closing in on Japan.