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Monday, October 15, 2012

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: When he was good, he was very, very good...

For years, I misunderstood a Yellow Submarine lyric as saying "Everyone of us is all we need."
What a happy accident!

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"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 constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." Franklin D Roosevelt, 1936 (Alan: What demon in the "fundamentalist" psyche persuades "the good Christians" that they are forgiven everything, but that anyone who fails to join their club deserves eternal torment in a Lake of Unquenchable Fire? The mere thought warms - but does not thaw - their frozen hearts.)

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." 1942

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