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.
Interpretation
Art thrives in an environment of individuality and freedom, while conformity stifles creativity.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's quote emphasizes the crucial relationship between individuality and artistic expression. He argues that when a society becomes rigid and adheres to stereotypes, art suffers because it requires personal expression and freedom to flourish. To support the arts, society must foster an atmosphere that values unique perspectives and creative freedom, as doing so allows both art and artists to thrive.
In practice
In a speech advocating for creative education, one might quote Roosevelt to highlight the importance of individuality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.
Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Once a song and dance man, always a song and dance man. Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell.
I am very much interested in the so-called useless object. I mean, it takes perfect craftsmanship, beautiful material carefully measured and crafted, but at the same time it’s really useless.
Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.
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