Time & Perspective Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Urgency is the point, but humility is the method. Roosevelt’s line reads like a pressure valve for democracy in a panic: act now, admit uncertainty, and treat policy as something you can revise rather than a sacred decree. In the middle of crisis, the public doesn’t just fear the emergency; it fears paralysis, the sense that leaders are waiting for perfect information while the house burns. FDR’s genius here is to make motion itself feel responsible.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two kinds of bad leadership. First, the ideologue who insists the “right” answer is already known and must be imposed whole. Second, the timid administrator who hides behind process, studies, and commissions until events decide for him. Roosevelt splits the difference: he claims moral certainty about the need to intervene (“we have to do something”) while conceding technical uncertainty about what will work (“the best we know how at the moment”). That pairing is not weakness; it’s rhetorical permission for experimentation.

Context matters. FDR governed through overlapping shocks: the Great Depression’s mass unemployment, banking collapse, social unrest, then the march toward global war. The New Deal’s early years were famously trial-and-error, with agencies created, redesigned, sometimes scrapped. This quote defends that improvisational statecraft as pragmatic, not reckless. “Modify it as we go along” is also political strategy: it invites citizens to tolerate initial messiness by promising adjustment, accountability, and learning. It recasts government not as an oracle, but as an instrument you can tune while you’re already playing.