Fireside Chats Quotes

During the Fireside Chats, half the country tuned in on their radios, and it was said that on hot summer nights when people had their windows open, one could walk through the residential downtown of a large city and hardly miss a word.

No one was a stranger in that crowd. We had all heard FDR's "Fireside Chats" and Edward R. Murrow's "This is London," listened to H.V. Kaltenborn for the evening news, and watched the newsreels before the movies. We'd read Ernie Pyle's columns, planted victory gardens, written V mails, sent care packages, gathered phonograph records for the USO, given up nylon for parachutes, saved bacon grease for explosives, and turned in tin foil, saved from gum wrappers, for ammunition. Most of all, we'd prayed that our loved ones would be safe.

They look at a random sequence of events and try to find connections that don’t even exist. The societal conditioning transforms their behaviors and thoughts to look for intricate theories that explain unsystematic happenings and I have a problem with that.

See, I believe randomness is pure beauty because it’s free of rules and constraints. So I would let randomness revel in its lawless rebellion.

As with my other targets, I had been observing Dr. Solovaar for a few days. And something in me told me that I should first meet him. One day, I decided to meet him at his university office. I acted as a jolly yet earnest psychology student who was desperate to start her Ph.D. under him. I went in with fake student getup, mark sheets, recommendations, and the whole shebang. But the moment I met him, the moment I gazed into his empty eyes, I realized that man had no soul. And the worst part is he realized it about me too.

Just stop thinking out of the box all the time because one day you are going to go inside the box, forever. Death is the eventual commonality, the concluding connection that ties us all.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

In the weeks following the December Pearl Harbor attack, Bataan and Singapore fell to Japan while German U-boats ravaged American shipping. In one of his famed fireside chats, FDR rather ominously evoked the miserable condition of the Continental Army at Valley Forge and made use of the famed Thomas Paine quote about times that “try men’s souls.” Under the direction of Roosevelt’s government, the National Association of Broadcasters forbade the use of the phrase now for some good news from the radio, as it highlighted the bleak situation.10

President Roosevelt himself even said during a fireside chat that “Today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack—the Trojan Horse, the Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs and traitors are the actors in this new energy.” These threats were exactly what Haffenden was up against on the waterfront. If the enemy infiltrated the harbor, and posed as a longshoreman, the missions he could carry out were terrifying. As unthinkable as they were, it was Haffenden’s job to be one step ahead. That meant getting information about sabotage activity, however he could get it.

To read, truly read, a text, is not a cozy fireside chat between well-brought up people, in which one shares information, recalls memories, has a good time. Reading a text is a confrontation, a row, hand-to-hand fighting, which one can only leave marked and changed. It is Jacob wrestling with the angel (Gen 32:23-33), a bloody fight, which went through the night «until daybreak»; an obstinate battle which refused to give up until it had obtained what it wanted: «I will not let you go until you bless me»; a fight which left its mark, as it did on the patriarch’s hip; a fight, at the end of which, while the reader is not allowed to know the angel’s name, Jacob still receives an unexpected revelation, in addition to the blessing, a new name which marks a change of identity:

I used to look forward to the time of day when my philosopher’s head would pop around my office door with an invitation, ‘Mr Chief Executive, I wonder if you might have a minute?’ This meant it was time for a fireside chat without the fire, some parental tutelage, unrequested at the time and unforgotten since. Simonds-Gooding’s were laser-like interventions, counsel dispensed as or before situations arose or as the occasion demanded. He was clear from the outset that he would be the philosopher, which meant, he said, that I had to be the butcher willing to get blood on my hands when necessary. Every great organisation had one of each, he said, ‘and I’ve had my turn at butchery.

And like any good newspaper, the show had severe critics. It was damned left and right. Real newsmen condemned it for hamming up the news. Communists called it fascistic. William Randolph Hearst labeled it Communist propaganda and forbade mention of it in the pages of his newspapers. It was banned in Germany. It even ran afoul of Roosevelt, who asked and later demanded that it stop impersonating him, because the actors were so good they were diminishing the impact of his Fireside Chats. It was accused of being pompous, pretentious, melodramatic, and bombastic. But it was never dull. In the mid-1930s, Time had Hooper numbers in the 25–point range.

he followed up his Mayflower speech with one of his famous “fireside chats,” urging the need for the Court plan and assuring his nationwide audience that he had no desire to be a dictator.