No president ever had more power than [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
In the Munich agreement in late 1938 [Franklin] Roosevelt sent his chief adviser Sumner Welles, who came back with a very supportive statement saying that Hitler was someone we could really do business with and so on.
I want to sing like Aretha Franklin. Before her I wanted the technical ability of Ella Fitzgerald.
You know who was a hero? Franklin Roosevelt.
Franklin Roosevelt had a pretty clear line. Ronald Reagan had a pretty clear line, people who rescue parties.
That was the reason why very few people fleeing the rise of fascism in Europe, especially in Germany, could get to the United States. And there were famous incidents like with the MS Saint Louis, which brought a lot of immigrants, mostly Jewish, from Europe. It reached Cuba, with people expecting to be admitted to the United States from there. But the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn't allow them in and they had to go back to Europe where many of them died in concentration camps.
It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.
Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, others, knew how to lead. They knew how to ask the American people for the right things.
Myrnin turned away to pick up his Ben Franklin spectacles, balanced them on his nose, and looked over them to say, "Don't do drugs. I feel I ought to say that.
The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.
My thinking is Lincolnian rather than Jeffersonian, Teddy Rooseveltian rather than Franklin D. Rooseveltian.
Franklin Roosevelt was very concerned about environmental issues.
The truth is that since the first book, I have wanted to emulate Benjamin Franklin and put together a healthy, wealthy and wise trilogy and so healthy was 'The 4-Hour Body,' wealthy was 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and then wise is 'The 4-Hour Chef. '
Reagan's half a disciple of Benjamin Franklin. He believes in early to bed.
I grew up listening to Commission, Kirk Franklin and Hezekiah Walker. If I was found listening to any rap, my pops would throw them out, or crush the CDs and tapes - literally.
Lincoln was able to say, you know, "It will make me very unhappy if I lose the presidency, but I'm committed to larger things. " If you look at candidates and say this is someone who can be happy to go back to their family or they have larger convictions. Franklin Roosevelt jeopardized his presidency by telling Americans in 1940, "We might have to fight Hitler. " He loved being president, but he loved defending freedom more.
He that blows the coals in quarrels that he has nothing to do with, has no right to complain if the sparks fly in his face. - Ben Franklin
I grew up in a household in which we had a clock that we won at Revere Beach during the Depression - one of those brass clocks that didn't work - but it showed Franklin D. Roosevelt standing at the wheel of the New Deal.
Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about Franklin D. Roosevelt. A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.