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.
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
When you're interviewing someone, you're in control. When you're being interviewed, you think you're in control, but you're not.
Jacqueline Woodson's books are such a gift to parents and children for their poignant subtlety and lyricism and their willingness to let a reader dwell in the pangs of realization that we sometimes try to protect our children from.
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.
You'll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.
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