dots-menu
×

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

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 749
AUTHOR: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)
QUOTATION: Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
ATTRIBUTION: President FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, speech accepting renomination for the presidency, June 27, 1936.—The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936, p. 235 (1938).

Senator John F. Kennedy quoted these words of Roosevelt’s in a campaign speech in Houston, Texas, September 12, 1960.—Freedom of Communications, final report of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, part 1, p. 203 (1961). Senate Rept. 87–994.
SUBJECTS: Government