Franklin D. Roosevelt said this in a speech on the fourteenth of April, 1939, months before the Second World War began. "Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds," he told the audience. "They have within themselves the power to become free at any moment." He was speaking to a specific moment, but the line has outlived the occasion by decades, because it makes a claim that applies well beyond the politics that first produced it: circumstances alone do not decide what a person is capable of. The mind usually gets there first. Roosevelt himself was in a position to know this better than most, given what he had already lived through by the time he said it.
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