“In 1940 every group–our farmers, our workers, and our businessmen–suffered from lack of good paying customers for the goods or services it had to sell. Lacking enough good customers, each group found itself financially unable to go on producing to capacity. So incomes remained low and workers were unemployed. All these groups–our farmers, businessmen, and workers–were each other’s chief and almost only customers… Each could have had a better income and itself been more prosperous and more secure if the others had been more prosperous and secure…This was the baffling paradox of the times, the inability of people on every hand to find markets for the goods that people on every hand so badly needed!”

“For my part, I have not the slightest doubt that in the future our annual productive capacity will not only equal but will far exceed 400 billion dollars. If there is anything that troubles me, it is not our capacity to produce. That we know and have known throughout our modern history. What troubles me is that we may not succeed in learning how to use our productive capacity to raise our standards of living, to lighten the burden of toil for all of our people…Our productive capacity is going to grow year by year. If we can’t grow up to it, grow up with it, learn to use it, the very achievements of our science and technology will be our undoing. And what could be more ridiculous!”

“When trouble came in the early thirties, there was plenty of talk that the free-enterprise system was doomed, that it couldn’t work, that it had to be changed. But did we change our system? No, we changed the administration of our government instead. This is a tribute to the good sense of the American people. They rightly put their finger on where the trouble lay. That is where they changed things…The people of this country want the free-enterprise system, but they want it to work. And they know where the final responsibility lies for making it work….They know that final responsibility for the general welfare, for making our system work for all of us, must rest on all of us through our government.”

“The problem of 140 million people learning to live better and better year after year sounds easy and pleasant. But strangely enough we shall probably find it a somewhat difficult task. It will be difficult because what it requires is that we get a lot more purchasing power–in other words, a lot more money–out into the hands of a lot more people…This means a different distribution of our national income than we’ve had before. And the redistribution of income is a subject which many people find distasteful to talk about–much less to do something about. But talk about it and do something about it we must, because this is not a matter of taste; it is a matter of national economic necessity.”

“Let us suppose that one per cent of the population were to receive 95 per cent of our entire national income, with the remaining 5 per cent spread among the rest of us. Could our system—could any system—work on that basis? One per cent of the people couldn’t possibly consume 95% of all the goods and services which the rest of us could produce…[This case] demonstrates the nonsense of the contention that the way our national income is divided among us has nothing to do with how much we produce or how many of us have jobs. On the contrary, the distribution of our annual income has almost everything to do with our total production and employment.”

“In this full-employment economy, there will be jobs and opportunities for all. That means that the haunting dread of unemployment–of no income at the end of the week to keep the family going–will be lifted from every corner of our land. It means that no mother’s heart will ache hopelessly because her child is undernourished and there is no food, or because he is ill and there is no doctor. In such a nation, moving ahead to new levels of prosperity, freedom will come to lose the empty sound it has held for impoverished millions…We–140 million of us–shall then at last truly be good neighbors, free from want and free from fear.”