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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 1154
AUTHOR: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)
QUOTATION: It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry—he staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial calvary. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army. These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
ATTRIBUTION: FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, governor of New York, radio address, Albany, New York, April 7, 1932.—The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1928–1932, pp. 624–25 (1938).
SUBJECTS: Man