In honor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's birthday today, here is an excerpt from his famous “Four freedoms speech” Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union, delivered on January 6, 1941:
In the future days,
which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four
essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom
of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is
freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom
from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings
which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants
everywhere in the world.
The fourth is
freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide
reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no
nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against
any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of
a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in
our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the
so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash
of a bomb.