Roosevelt(FDR, not Teddy) was a traitor who sold this country out to the banking interests, who, acting as their agent, made it illegal for Americans to hold private property(gold), and stole 40% of the money within 2 years of coercing the idiot people to turn in their gold @ 20/oz face value for lying paper promises(FRN's) by soon artificially pegging the price of gold at 35/oz, stripping the value of the paper he gave the people in exchange for their gold, and despite his mealy-mouthed pretense otherwise via the speech you cited...not to mention the LEGION of Unconstitutional gov't offices he multiplied and established with a Quisling Congress not equalled 'til the 109th BenDover Congress of ze Bushreich.

And the F&F quite despised democracy, which is why we were given a Constitutional REPUBLIC, and nothing but elected officers sworn to uphold and defend that Constitution...again, until Roosevelt established a massive gov't bureaucracy of appointees in various Unconstitutional departments he created with that same complaisance.

Here are just a few citations in support of this notion, both from their time-period as well as subsequent, by thinking men of all generations:

“If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.”
—Benjamin Disraeli

Yeah...Disraeli's an f'in idiot; what HE wrote certainly has never come to pass...

"That, as a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangements of the powers of society, or, in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the laws, is the best of republics."
-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)
Reference: The Works of John Adams, Charles Adams, ed., 194

"No good government but what is republican...the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'"
--John Adams(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: "Thoughts on Government" January, 1776

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic

"I wouldn't call it fascism, exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed-down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either."
-- Edward Zehr(1936-2001) Columnist

"Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation."
-- Karl Marx, Father of Communism, Author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
(btw---Marx, and later Communist leaders, considered democracy to be an essential stepping-stone to establishing the totalitarian Socialist State, hence their promotion of and funding for quite a few "democratic" movements worldwide.)

"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority."
--Lord Acton[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: The History of Freedom in Antiquity, 1877

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.  There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.":
--John Adams(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814

"...[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention...intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country."
--Fisher Ames(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
Source: 1805

"Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism."
--Fisher Ames(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer

"A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments."
--Aristotle(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher

"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
--Giordano Bruno(1548-1699)
Source: On Shadows of Ideas

"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."
--Edmund Burke(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker

"Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero."
--Thomas Carlyle(1795-1881) Scottish Philosopher and Author
Source: Chartism, VI 1839

“It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.”
— Joseph A. Schumpeter, 1942.

"[W]e are confirmed in the opinion, that the present age would be deficient in their duty to God, their posterity and themselves, if they do not establish an American republic. This is the only form of government we wish to see established; for we can never be willingly subject to any other King than He who, being possessed of infinite wisdom, goodness and rectitude, is alone fit to possess unlimited power."
Instructions of Malden, Massachusetts, for a Declaration of Independence, 27 May 1776 Reference: Documents of American History, Commager, vol. 1 (97)

"English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralized democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts."
-- James Anthony Froude(1818-1894) Author and historian
Source: Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1872

"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."-
- Thomas Jefferson (Letter to William Hunter, 11 March 1790) Reference: Bartlett's; check LOA edition

“When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.”
—Fredrich August von Hayek

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it---good and hard.”
—H. L. Mencken

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.  The first are the rich and the well-born; the other the mass of the people ... turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.  Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the Government ...Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy."
-- Alexander Hamilton(1757-1804)
Source: speech to the Constitutional Convention concerning the United States Senate, 06/18/1787, quoted in the notes of Judge Yates

F.O. is quite correct.  Believe him.

At any rate, we don't have a democracy in America, now, either, and one is NOT coming; history records that most just civilizations begin with Republics which degenerate into Democracies which degenerate into tyrannies, then the tyranny is finally overthrown and the cycle begins again...in literate countries, at any rate; in illiterate ones, one tyranny is simply supplanted by another, vis Libya.

What we have now is a dictatorship/tyranny of the wealthy, aka an oligarchy, a corporatocracy, or a kleptocracy(as you will), supported by their horns in national media control; wanna bet that during the next "election," you hear squat from any candidate other than a Democan or Republicrat, both wholly-owned and interchangeable subsidiaries of the Corporatocracy that they are and remain?  This purported "democracy" is a smokescreen behind which the corporate stooges hide, while they offer the illusion of choice to you, a choice between Scylla or Charybdis, Monster A or Monster B, either one of which have corporate chains on them already, ready to be turned loose on the general pop again.

As should be self-evident after the plethora of citations supplied(and i have several dozen more, if these fail to pierce the veil of self-delusion you appear to be suffering from), the majority of people are easily-swayed idiots who would throw off Constitutional protections in a heartbeat if it helped destroy their enemy-du-jour, the one that the media TELLS them is their enemy today.

And voting is a joke today, too; do your perhaps-ignorant self a favor and visit www.blackboxvoting.org, read up on what good ol' Bev Harris discovered about the electronic voting machines, then stfu about "democracy" EVER being a "good thing."  You have apparently fallen victim to the mass-media talkin'-head hypnotism of the Big Lie---have "authority" figures repeat a lie often enough, and soon the American idiot accepts it as "truth..." to wit, the millions who are quite certain that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on 9/11 after the authority-figure media blitz during the run-up to the Iraq war II.

Lastly, probably the most illustrative/memorable citation from one of the founders:

"A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner; in a Republic, there is a well-armed lamb--- contesting the vote."
~Benjamin Franklin

With goodwill to all the People(except Oathbreakers)-

Hatman

Apr 14, 2012 -- 9:34AM, catboxer wrote:

And the F&F quite despised democracy, which is why we were given a Constitutional REPUBLIC...

If that's the case, then why does the Constitution begin with the words "We the people..."?

Patrick Henry asked the same question, but more along the lines of "What right do you have, Mr. Madison, to say "We, the People?  Shouldn't it REALLY say "We, the States?", for you should know by now(after multiple postings of the Aldermen case), that the People are not a party to the Constitution, and have zero right to sue for a breach of it's provisions.

Only the States may complain and seek redress.

With goodwill to all the People(except Oathbreakers)-

Hatman

Reformationnow; That is why passive (or "meek"), conscientious, liberal progressives realize that rather than stoop to the level of aggressive, offensive and militant right-wing partisans, the best way to influence people is through effective art, literature, plays, documentaries, movies, and songs.

Did any of you aggressive right wingers laugh as hard as I did with that stupid statement.

An example of the passive liberal progressives trying to influence;

According to police, the two men who were arrested in front of the Sixth Street Community Center last night allegedly assaulted an NYPD sergeant with a metal pipe in front of the Starbucks on Astor Place. One of the men, 41-year-old Alexander Penley, is an attorney and has been an Occupy Wall Street organizer since the movement began in the fall.
Penley, along with 30-year-old Nicholas Thommen, were arrested around 10 p.m. after what witnesses described as a violent scuffle between the two men and police officers, and are charged with a litany of offenses, including assaulting a police officer, menacing, criminal possession of a weapon, resisting arrest, and inciting a riot.
Penley has been quoted in stories about Occupy Wall Street in The Guardian and USA Today, and appeared on the local Manhattan television show Let Them Talk in October.
An NYPD spokesman said that officers received a report around 9 p.m. that a "disorderly group" had gathered in front of the Starbucks at Lafayette and Astor Place. A video transmission detailing that an officer needed assistance followed, and police found "individuals hitting the window of the establishment." When a sergeant attempted to intervene and make an arrest, "the crowd became unruly," and he was allegedly struck with a metal pipe by two men.

gothamist.com/2012/04/15/occupy_proteste...