Public Works Programs Quotes

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing.

The big policy wins of the New Deal were actually offered as compromises. Because the alternative seemed to be revolution.

We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the Whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.

I can't tell you how many times at the breakfast table my dad would curse out Franklin Roosevelt. I love my father. He was an intelligent man, but he really didn't like regulations of the Roosevelt style, or the taxes. He was an Dwight Eisenhower man. And that's what Eisenhower did, committed to breaking down the program.

My aspirations for this country would be on the scope of what Franklin Roosevelt brought to this country in 1932 when he saw a nation that was broken economically.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.

FDR was enormously influenced by this, and afraid. I mean, his intervention was to save capitalism. It wasn't to basically appease the workers. And I think that today you don't have those movements.

The New Deal was going to redistribute the national income according to ideals of social and economic justice.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.