Franklin Delano Roosevelt

• This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself —nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.
  • First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933)

• 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, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants —everywhere in the world.
  The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor —anywhere in the wold.
  That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
  • The Four Freedoms Speech (January 6, 1941)

• Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
• Speeches of FDR
• Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute