War & Peace Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s line lands like a rebuke dressed up as a moral truism: if your love keeps a ledger, it’s not love, it’s commerce. Coming from a president who built his political identity around collective obligation, the sentence reads less like private counsel and more like civic coaching. “Self-interest” isn’t just personal greed here; it’s the entire posture of scarcity, the reflex to protect your slice even when the larger project is falling apart. By naming it “the enemy,” FDR turns affection into something with stakes, a force that can be sabotaged, corroded, defeated.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “True affection” is a loaded standard, implying counterfeits: politeness that wants a favor, loyalty that lasts only while it pays, charity performed for applause. Roosevelt doesn’t argue; he draws a boundary. That’s how leaders moralize effectively: create a category people want to belong to (“true”), then identify the behavior that disqualifies them.

Context matters. In an era defined by economic collapse and world war, asking Americans to accept rationing, taxes, and shared sacrifice required an emotional vocabulary bigger than policy. The New Deal’s promise wasn’t merely administrative competence; it was a story about mutual care as a national survival strategy. Read that way, “affection” scales up: not just romantic sentiment, but social trust. The subtext is bracingly political: a country can’t love itself into cohesion while everyone is busy negotiating for advantage.