Leadership Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s line lands like a moral weather report: something once clear and directional has been swallowed by a bigger, indifferent force. The simile does two jobs at once. Rivers are energetic, visible, useful; the sea is vast, mixing everything until distinctions blur. By framing self-interest as the ocean, he implies it’s not a quirky human flaw but a systemic condition - powerful, enveloping, and easy to mistake for “just how things are.” Virtue, in this picture, isn’t defeated in a dramatic battle; it’s diluted.

The intent is political as much as ethical. FDR governed in an era when the country’s faith in institutions had been battered by the Great Depression and, later, the global stakes of war. Self-interest wasn’t merely personal greed; it was a culture of extraction: businesses clinging to profit over public stability, politicians treating crisis as an opportunity to protect turf, citizens retreating into scarcity thinking. The New Deal’s underlying argument was that private incentives, left to run wild, don’t automatically yield public good - they can drown it.

Subtextually, Roosevelt is also issuing a quiet warning to democracies: virtue is fragile not because people are evil, but because self-interest is convenient, defensible, even patriotic when dressed up as “freedom” or “rights.” The line’s rhetorical power is its inevitability. You don’t shame a river for reaching the sea; you build levees, channels, and dams. In other words: if you want virtue to survive, you don’t just preach it - you engineer conditions that keep it from disappearing.