Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
| NUMBER: | 749 |
| AUTHOR: | Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) |
| QUOTATION: | Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. 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. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | President Senator John F. Kennedy quoted these words of Roosevelt’s in a campaign speech in Houston, Texas, September 12, 1960.—Freedom of Communications, final report of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, part 1, p. 203 (1961). Senate Rept. 87–994. |
| SUBJECTS: | Government |