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.
Interpretation
Fear can be more debilitating than the actual challenges we face.
This quote emphasizes that fear is often an irrational and overwhelming force that can hinder our ability to take action. Rather than the circumstances themselves, it is our fear of those circumstances that can create obstacles, preventing us from moving forward and making progress. Roosevelt suggests that overcoming this fear is essential to achieving success and advancing in life.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming obstacles.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
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.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.
They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.
I didn't wake up and decide to become an activist. But you couldn't help notice the inequities, the injustices. It was all around you.
Be brave and celebrate with us your 'perceived flaws,' as society tells us. May we make our flaws famous, and thus redefine the heinous.
So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.
Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.