--- title: Harry Hopkins url: https://propagandaarchive.org/quotes/harry-hopkins/ description: 4 verified quotes from Harry Hopkins, Special Assistant to the President, with sources. section: FRAME --- ![Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-interwar.jpg) [Quotes](https://propagandaarchive.org/quotes/) · United States # Harry Hopkins ![Harry Hopkins, undated portrait](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/images/roosevelt-administration/harry-hopkins.jpg) [Photo](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HOPKINS,_HARRY_LCCN2016862688.jpg): Harris & Ewing, Public domain (Library of Congress: no known restrictions on publication) Special Assistant to the President · United States On the regime page: [Roosevelt administration](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/roosevelt-administration/#harry-hopkins) 4 quotes, oldest first. [Filter with other speakers](https://propagandaarchive.org/quotes/#speaker=harry-hopkins). 1. > “Behind that is a moral philosophy, if anyone is poor it's because something is wrong with them. Give them just as little relief as possible so you won't encourage them. They want these unemployed to walk up timidly and knock on the door, and why should they? They are American citizens like the rest of us. It is no fault of their own that they are out of work, and it is the business of society to take care of them. It shouldn't be done as an act of degradation. I made up my mind early in this game that relief was a matter of right and not a matter of charity.” — September 19, 1936 · Speech · WPA luncheon — Defense of federal work and relief programs by the Works Progress Administration administrator, delivered about six weeks before the 1936 election. He was describing the Elizabethan Poor Law tradition and his own approach to relief. — Address at WPA Luncheon, 19 September 1936, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, as printed in the MIT 21H.102 primary source collection "The New Deal" [Source](https://web.mit.edu/course/21/21h.102/www/Primary%20source%20collections/The%20New%20Deal/Hopkins,%20Speech%20on%20federal%20relief.htm) 2. > “I am getting sick and tired of these people on the WPA and local relief rolls being called chiselers and cheats. It doesn't do any good to call these people names, because they are just like the rest of us.” — September 19, 1936 · Speech · WPA luncheon — From the same address, answering critics who called people on relief rolls cheats. He argued that investigators in any group of applicants would find about five percent who did not need relief. — Address at WPA Luncheon, 19 September 1936, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, as printed in the MIT 21H.102 primary source collection "The New Deal" [Source](https://web.mit.edu/course/21/21h.102/www/Primary%20source%20collections/The%20New%20Deal/Hopkins,%20Speech%20on%20federal%20relief.htm) 3. > “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return. Well, I'm going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which Mr. Johnston's mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up: 'Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.'” — January 17, 1941 · Speech · Glasgow, dinner hosted by Tom Johnston with Winston Churchill Verified (secondary source) — Hopkins was in Britain on his first mission as Roosevelt's personal envoy, before Lend-Lease was passed. The article says Churchill was seen in tears at the remarks. — Harry Hopkins, after-dinner remarks, Glasgow, 17 January 1941, as quoted in "Roosevelt's Bracken: Harry Hopkins 'Lord Root of the Matter'," Finest Hour 146 (International Churchill Society), citing Martin Gilbert [Source](https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-146/roosevelts-bracken-harry-hopkins-lord-root-of-the-matter/) 4. > “I told Mr. Stalin that I came as personal representative of the President. The President considered Hitler the enemy of mankind and that he therefore wished to aid the Soviet Union in its fight against Germany.” — July 30, 1941 · Private-remark · Moscow, Kremlin, meeting with Joseph Stalin — Hopkins visited Moscow as President Roosevelt's personal representative five weeks after Germany invaded the Soviet Union and before Lend-Lease aid to the USSR was approved. The memorandum is his own written account of what he told Stalin. — Memorandum by Harry L. Hopkins, 5 September 1941, of his conference with Stalin at the Kremlin on 30 July 1941, in Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1941, General, The Soviet Union, vol. I, document 751, pp. 802-803 [Source](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v01/d751) ## Often attributed, not verified These words circulate under Harry Hopkins’s name but could not be traced to a source. They are listed so readers can check them, not as Harry Hopkins’s words. - > “We will spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.” — Misattributed Usually said to come from: Harry Hopkins, c. 1938, often given as 'Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.' — Reported in the New York Times in October 1938 by Arthur Krock, citing an unnamed source (later said to be the producer Max Gordon). Hopkins denied saying it in a letter to the Times; Krock replied defending his verification; Gordon later said the words gave the gist rather than the exact words (as summarised in secondary accounts read by this checker; the 1938 Times pages were not seen). The wording varies between sources. Not published as Hopkins's words. - > “People don't eat in the long run, they eat every day.” — Unverifiable Usually said to come from: Harry Hopkins on relief policy, usually dated 1933. — Cited in secondary accounts (some pointing to Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 1948/1950) with no date or place; the 1936 WPA luncheon address in the Hopkins Papers does not contain it. No primary text was located by this checker. Not published as his words.