Looking Forward

"Looking Forward" is a collection of speeches made by the American statesman and political leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. The book was written at the start of his first term in 1933, offering a glimpse into the man, his policies and ideological persuasions. He states that, "In the comments to follow I speak not of politics, but of government; not of parties, but of universal principles. They are not political except in that large sense in which a great American once expressed a definition of politics—that nothing in all human life is foreign to the science of politics. The quality of national politics, viewed as a science which is capable of affecting for the better the lives of the average man and woman in America, is the concern of national leadership—particularly in such years as these, when the hand of discouragement has fallen upon us, when it seems that things are in a rut, fixed, settled, that the world has grown old and tired and very much out of joint. That is the mood of depression, of dire and weary depression which, if the quality of our political leadership is right, should vanish so utterly that it will be difficult to reconstruct the mood."