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.
Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.
Good books are for consideration after, too.
A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit.
Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment.
The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.