Politics & Power Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

A president doesn’t praise a nation’s “sense of humor” and “sense of proportion” just to be charming; he’s trying to steady the room. Roosevelt’s line reads like a compliment, but it’s also a quiet piece of political engineering. In the middle of crisis - economic collapse, war anxiety, the daily churn of rumor and panic - the most valuable resource isn’t money or even morale. It’s judgment. “Proportion” is the word doing the heavy lifting: a plea to rank threats correctly, to resist melodrama, to keep democratic decision-making from getting hijacked by fear.

Pairing humor with proportion is classic FDR. Humor is the social lubricant; proportion is the civic muscle. Together they imply a citizenry capable of absorbing bad news without turning brittle or conspiratorial, able to laugh without slipping into denial. It’s reassurance with a spine: you are the kind of people who won’t be stampeded. That matters because Roosevelt governed through persuasion as much as policy. The New Deal required public tolerance for experimentation, bureaucratic expansion, and inevitable mistakes. Wartime leadership required patience with sacrifice and a willingness to treat setbacks as temporary rather than fateful.

The subtext is also a gentle rebuke to the loud minority - demagogues, doom merchants, and cynics who profit when a public loses its scale. By calling the “overwhelming majority” sane, he isolates the hysterics as un-American outliers. It’s populism with an adult tone: not “we are angry,” but “we are steady.”