FDR

We have learned that when we deliberately try to legislate neutrality, our neutrality laws may operate unevenly and unfairly--may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim.

First, we must have armed forces and defenses strong enough to ward off sudden attack against strategic positions and key facilities essential to ensure sustained resistance and ultimate victory.

If these first two essentials are reasonably provided for, we must be able confidently to invoke the third element, the underlying strength of citizenship--the self-confidence, the ability, the imagination and the devotion that give the…

A strong and united nation may be destroyed if it is unprepared against sudden attack.

But even a nation well armed and well organized from a strictly military standpoint may, after a period of time, meet defeat if it is unnerved by self-distrust, endangered by class prejudice, by dissension between capital and labor, by…

In meeting the troubles of the world we must meet them as one people--with a unity born of the fact that for generations those who have come to our shores, representing many kindreds and tongues, have been welded by common opportunity into…

If another form of government can present a united front in its attack on a democracy, the attack must and will be met by a united democracy.

For the first time we have moved upon deep-seated problems affecting our national strength and have forged national instruments adequate to meet them.

We are strengthening the weakest spot in our system of industrial supply-- its long smouldering labor difficulties.

We have cleaned up our credit system so that depositor and investor alike may more readily and willingly make their capital available for peace or war.

We are giving to our youth new opportunities for work and education.

We have sustained the morale of all the population by the dignified recognition of our obligations to the aged, the helpless and the needy.

Above all, we have made the American people conscious of their interrelationship and their interdependence.

They sense a common destiny and a common need of each other.

Differences of occupation, geography, race and religion no longer obscure the nation's fundamental unity in thought and in action.

Never have there been six years of such far-flung internal preparedness in our history.

And this has been done without any dictator's power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill…

We have had to forge new tools for a new role of government operating in a democracy--a role of new responsibility for new needs and increased responsibility for old needs, long neglected.

Many of those who fought bitterly against the forging of these new tools welcome their use today.

The Nation looks to the Congress to improve the new machinery which we have permanently installed, provided that in the process the social usefulness of the machinery is not destroyed or impaired.

All of us agree that we should simplify and improve laws if experience and operation clearly demonstrate the need.

For instance, all of us want better provision for our older people under our social security legislation.

For the medically needy we must provide better care.

Most of us agree that for the sake of employer and employee alike we must find ways to end factional labor strife and employer-employee disputes.

Most of us recognize that none of these tools can be put to maximum effectiveness unless the executive processes of government are revamped--reorganized, if you will--into more effective combination.