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.
Interpretation
Books are essential for winning ideological battles, just as ships are vital for naval warfare.
Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasizes the importance of books as vital tools in the discourse of ideas, likening their significance to that of ships in warfare. He illustrates that just as a naval fleet requires ships to succeed at sea, intellectual struggles and the advancement of human thought depend on the dissemination of knowledge through books, which provide the intellectual strength and longevity necessary for sustaining ideological battles.
In practice
In a speech about promoting literacy and education, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of books.
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.
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.
We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays.
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.
Putting a computer in front of a child and expecting it to teach him is like putting a book under his pillow, only more expensive
Extemporaneous speaking should be practised [sic] and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.
Conscious listening is very largely overlooked in the mainstream of education. It's such an important skill in life. And yet we expect children to pick it up from home or from peers informally.
People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.
I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions, and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy in life.
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