Franklin D. Roosevelt on the 150th Anniversary of the Constitution

“No one cherishes more deeply than I the civil and religions liberties achieved by so much blood and anguish.... But the Constitution guarantees liberty, not license masquerading as liberty.... the government of the United States refuses to forget that the Bill of Rights was put into the Constitution not only to protect minorities against intolerance of majorities, but to protect majorities against the enthronement of minorities...

Nothing would so surely destroy the substance of what the Bill of Rights protects than its perversion to prevent social progress. The surest protection of the individual and of minorities is that fundamental tolerance and feeling for fair play which the Bill o f Rights assumes. But tolerance and fair p/ay would disappear here as it has in some other lands if the great mass of people were denied confidence in their justice, their security and their self-respect. Desperate people in other lands surrendered their liberties when freedom came merely to mean humiliation and starvation....”

★ FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT. Press release signed and inscribed, Sept. 17,1937. #25712.002