A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
Interpretation
Books are essential for winning ideological battles, just as ships are vital for naval warfare.
Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasizes the importance of books as vital tools in the discourse of ideas, likening their significance to that of ships in warfare. He illustrates that just as a naval fleet requires ships to succeed at sea, intellectual struggles and the advancement of human thought depend on the dissemination of knowledge through books, which provide the intellectual strength and longevity necessary for sustaining ideological battles.
In practice
In a speech about promoting literacy and education, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of books.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays.
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.
One of the issues I kept saying to my students is you have to learn to interrupt. When you raise your hand at a meeting, by the time they get to you, the point is not germane. So the bottom line is active listening. If you are going to interrupt, you look for opportunities. You have to know what you're talking about.
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