Leadership Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

A president doesn’t complain about “experts” because he hates knowledge; he does it because he’s managing power. Roosevelt’s line is a neat piece of democratic inoculation: it lowers the prestige of technocracy without rejecting expertise outright. In the middle of crisis, expert disagreement isn’t just an academic footnote - it’s political dynamite. If economists, generals, doctors, or administrators can’t speak with one voice, the public’s faith in “the plan” frays. Roosevelt preempts that fracture by reframing discord as normal, even inevitable.

The phrasing is deliberately disarming. “As many opinions” sounds like friendly realism, not an attack. “Experts” stays plural and abstract, a category rather than a target, which lets him diffuse blame while keeping the tools of governance intact. The subtext: don’t confuse credentialed confidence with certainty, and don’t demand impossible unanimity before acting. That’s an argument for executive decision-making under uncertainty - the kind of leadership posture FDR built into the New Deal and wartime administration, where speed and experimentation mattered as much as consensus.

It also functions as a subtle public-relations move. If policy outcomes disappoint, the administration can point to a crowded marketplace of expert counsel rather than a single failed authority. Today, in our era of epidemiologists on cable news and economists on X, the line still lands because it captures a stubborn truth: expertise can narrow the range of plausible answers, but it rarely cancels politics - or responsibility.