FDR

Our full energies may now be released to invigorate the processes of recovery in order to preserve our reforms, and to give every man and woman who wants to work a real job at a living wage.

Our own hour-glass tells us that we are off on a race to make democracy work, so that we may be efficient in peace and therefore secure in national defense.

This time element forces us to still greater efforts to attain the full employment of our labor and our capital.

The first duty of our statesmanship is to bring capital and man-power together.

Can we compete with them by boldly seeking methods of putting idle men and idle capital together and, at the same time, remain within our American way of life, within the Bill of Rights, and within the bounds of what is, from our point of…

We want to get enough capital and labor at work to give us a total turnover of business, a total national income, of at least eighty billion dollars a year.

They include wholehearted acceptance of new standards of honesty in our financial markets.

The other approach to the question of government spending takes the position that this Nation ought not to be and need not be only a sixty billion dollar nation; that at this moment it has the men and the resources sufficient to make it at…

By our common sense action of resuming government activities last spring, we have reversed a recession and started the new rising tide of prosperity and national income which we are now just beginning to enjoy.

It is my conviction that down in their hearts the American public--industry, agriculture, finance--want this Congress to do whatever needs to be done to raise our national income to eighty billion dollars a year.

Investment for prosperity can be made in a democracy.

My answer is, "Yes, but it also gets rid of some other things which we Americans intend very definitely to keep--and we still intend to do our own thinking.

The cost of being cast into a concentration camp.

The cost of being afraid to walk down the street with the wrong neighbor.

The cost of having our children brought up, not as free and dignified human beings, but as pawns molded and enslaved by a machine.

If the avoidance of these costs means taxes on my income; if avoiding these costs means taxes on my estate at death, I would bear those taxes willingly as the price of my breathing and my children breathing the free air of a free country…

Events abroad have made it increasingly clear to the American people that dangers within are less to be feared than dangers from without.

If, therefore, a solution of this problem of idle men and idle capital is the price of preserving our liberty, no formless selfish fears can stand in the way.

Once I prophesied that this generation of Americans had a rendezvous with destiny.

This generation will "nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. . . .

The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.

The social and economic forces which have been mismanaged abroad until they have resulted in revolution, dictatorship and war are the same as those which we here are struggling to adjust peacefully at home.

More than a century and a half later we, who are here today, still believe with them that our best defense is the promotion of our general welfare and domestic tranquillity.

To say that the domestic well-being of one hundred and thirty million Americans is deeply affected by the well-being or the ill-being of the populations of other nations is only to recognize in world affairs the truth that we all accept in…

If in any local unit--a city, county, State or region--low standards of living are permitted to continue, the level of the civilization of the entire nation will be pulled downward.