Leadership Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

In Roosevelt's hands, this is less a tidy aphorism than a governing philosophy with a knife tucked inside it. "Rules" evokes the machinery of institutions: procedural habits, bureaucratic checklists, the comforting fiction that if we follow the manual, we're absolved of judgment. By demoting rules from "sacred" status, FDR is prying moral authority away from the letter of law and handing it back to the spirit - the principles a democracy claims to serve.

The subtext is a defense of flexibility under pressure, and it arrives from a president who made flexibility a political weapon. The New Deal required improvisation at scale: new agencies, novel regulations, experimental programs built quickly because the crisis wasn't waiting for perfect statutory elegance. Later, wartime governance demanded even more adaptation. Roosevelt is justifying a willingness to bend procedure when procedure becomes a luxury or, worse, an alibi for inaction.

But the line isn't a blank check. He draws a sharp hierarchy: rules are contingent; principles are not. That distinction does rhetorical work. It reassures anxious citizens that change isn't chaos, it's fidelity to something deeper than precedent. It also warns bureaucrats and opponents: don't hide behind process to block outcomes the nation needs, and don't confuse tradition with virtue.

The phrase "not necessarily" is the masterstroke - cautious, lawyerly, politically survivable. He's not torching the rulebook; he's insisting it be treated as a tool, not an idol. In a moment when Americans were renegotiating what government could do, Roosevelt makes the argument that legitimacy comes from aims, not rituals.