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Eleanor Roosevelt

  • If it's a man's game so decidedly that a woman would be soiled by entering it, then there is something radically wrong with the American game of politics.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in The New York Times ()
  • The leisure class is one in which individuals have sufficient economic security and sufficient leisure to find opportunity for a variety of satisfactions in life.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • White House press conference ()
  • ... what one has to do usually can be done ...

  • Those who never sink into this peace of nature lose a tremendous well of strength, for there is something healing and life-giving in the mere atmosphere surrounding a country house.

  • There are three fundamentals for human happiness — love and faith, and work which will produce at least a minimum of material security. These things must be made possible for all human beings, men and women alike.

  • A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.

  • ... those who attack always do so with greater fervor than those who defend.

  • We have come to accept bigger and bigger things as meaning greater and greater efficiency, more and more prosperity and more and more freedom. The two do not go together of necessity ...

  • It is so much easier to be enthusiastic than to reason!

  • I often wonder how we can make the more fortunate in this country fully aware of the fact that the problem of the unemployed is not a mechanical one. It is a problem alive and throbbing with human pain.

  • More people are ruined by victory, I imagine, than by defeat.

  • ... experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur.

  • ... it is always easier to do nothing than to try a new line of action.

  • We need emotional outlets in this country, and the more artistic people we develop the better it will be for us as a nation.

  • How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions.

  • ... the greatest luxury I know is sitting up reading in bed.

  • ... it is harder to be philosophical when you are young.

  • I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing in life is very permanent.

  • ... what we need in the world is manners ... I think that if, instead of preaching brotherly love, we preached good manners, we might get a little further. It sounds less righteous and more practical.

  • How can we be such fools as to go on senselessly taking human life in this way? Why the women in every nation do not rise up and refuse to bring children into a world of this kind is beyond my understanding.

  • All of us in this country give lip service to the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights and emphasized by every additional amendment, and yet when war is stirring in the world, many of us are ready to curtail our civil liberties. We do not stop to think that curtailing these liberties may in the end bring us a greater danger than the danger we are trying to avert.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Cosmopolitan ()
  • A democratic form of government, a democratic way of life, presupposes free public education over a long period; it presupposes also an education for personal responsibility that too often is neglected.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • "Let Us Have Faith in Democracy," in Department of Agriculture, Land Policy Review ()
  • Democracy cannot be static. Whatever is static is dead.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • "Let Us Have Faith in Democracy," in Department of Agriculture, Land Policy Review ()
  • I think if the people in this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, as against the privileged few.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Ladies' Home Journal ()
  • Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • "How to Take Criticism," in Ladies' Home Journal ()
  • I can't tell you how to succeed, but I can tell you how to fail: Try to please everybody.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • advice to newly elected President Harry S. Truman ()
  • I think that if the atomic bomb did nothing more, it scared the people to the point where they realized that either they must do something about preventing war or there is a chance that there might be a morning when we would not wake up.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • news conference ()
  • It is very difficult to have a free, fair and honest press anywhere in the world. In the first place, as a rule, papers are largely supported by advertising, and that immediately gives the advertisers a certain hold over the medium which they use.

  • No, I have never wanted to be a man. I have often wanted to be more effective as a woman, but I have never felt that trousers would do the trick!

  • A successful life for a man or for a woman seems to me to lie in the knowledge that one has developed to the limit the capacities with which one was endowed; that one has contributed something constructive to family and friends and to a home community; that one has brought happiness wherever it was possible; that one has earned one's way in the world, has kept some friends, and need not be ashamed to face oneself honestly.

  • Perhaps the basic thing which contributes to charm is the ability to forget oneself and be engrossed in other people.

  • It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in The New York Times ()
  • A guest is really good or bad because of the host or hostess who makes being a guest an easy or a difficult task.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Ladies' Home Journal ()
  • ... no leader can be too far ahead of his followers.

  • ... practically nothing we do ever stands by itself. If it is good, it will serve some good purpose in the future. If it is evil, it may haunt us and handicap our efforts in unimagined ways.

  • To appear to be on the inside and know more than others about what is going on is a great temptation for most people. It is a rare person who is willing to seem to know less than he does ... Somehow, people seem to feel that it is belittling to their importance not to know more than other people.

  • ... I kept praying that I might be able to prevent a repetition of this stupidity called war. I have tried to keep the promise I made to myself, but the progress that the world is making toward peace seems like the crawling of a little child, very halting and slow.

  • There is a small articulate minority in this country which advocates changing our national symbol which is the eagle to that of the ostrich and withdrawing from the UN.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • speech before the Democratic national convention in Chicago ()
  • The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

  • A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.

  • You always admire what you really don't understand.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • on "Meet the Press" ()
  • I'm sure that all the drivers and motorcycle police had once been racing drivers and were eager to get back to that profession.

  • Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • United Nations speech ()
  • To leave the world richer — that is the ultimate success.

  • Curiously enough, it is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.

  • First of my own personal requirements is inner calm. This, I think, is an essential. One of the secrets of using your time well is to gain a certain ability to maintain peace within yourself so that much can go on around you and you can stay calm inside.

  • When you get to the end of your rope — tie a knot in it and hang on.

  • Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.

  • You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face ... You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

  • Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.

  • Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive.

  • ... so much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating and destructive effect upon society than the others.

  • ... one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, 'It can't be done.'

  • No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.

  • We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in The New York Times ()
  • [On being a First Lady:] You will find that you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in N.Y. Herald Tribune ()
  • No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Catholic Digest ()
  • Our obligation to the world is, primarily, our obligation to our own future. Obviously, we cannot develop beyond a certain point unless other nations develop, too.

  • True patriotism springs from a belief in the dignity of the individual, freedom and equality not only for Americans but for all people on earth, universal brotherhood and good will, and a constant and earnest striving toward the principles and ideasl on which this country was founded.

  • All of us ... should remember that no amount of flag-waving, pledging allegiance, or fervent singing of the national anthem is evidence that we are patriotic in the real sense of the word. ... Outward behavior, while important, is not the real measure of a man's patriotism.

  • Life was meant to be lived and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn one's back on life.

  • ... talking too much is a far greater social fault than talking too little.

  • ... the term 'young adults' which is so often used today seems to me a misnomer, and one which, if taken seriously, may lead the adolescent into misunderstanding as to his nature and his role in life. 'Young" he is; 'adult' he is not.

  • Too many of us stay walled up because we are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

  • There is in every country an antipathy to the foreigner ...

  • I have often thought that less is expected of the president of a great corporation than of an American wife.

  • No human being can ever 'own' another, whether in friendship, love, marriage, or parenthood.

  • In business courtesy and efficiency have a symbiotic relationship.

  • True hospitality consists of giving the best of yourself to your guests.

  • We can no longer oversimplify. We can no longer build lazy and false stereotypes: Americans are like this, Russians are like that, a Jew behaves in such a way, a Negro thinks in a different way. The lazy generalities — 'You know how women are ... Isn't that just like a man?' The world cannot be understood from a single point of view.

  • I think it is impossible for one human being really to know another without first knowing and being at peace with himself.

  • A number of people still think of the United States as being overwhelmingly English, Protestant, and white. This erroneous idea influences their whole outlook.

  • To most teenagers, life is a strange uncharted land filled with a mixture of new joys, intensely felt, and painful confusions for which they know no anodyne.

  • People who 'view with alarm' never build anything.

  • ... nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would literally rather die than change.

  • Poverty is an expensive luxury. We cannot afford it.

  • Every age is an unknown country.

  • ... the first freedom of man, I contend, is the freedom to eat.

  • A respect for the rights of other peoples to determine their forms of government and their economy will not weaken our democracy. It will inevitably strengthen it.

  • One of the first things we must get rid of is the idea that democracy is tantamount to capitalism.

  • What we apparently have failed to grasp is that, in this new world in which we live, the collective hunger of great masses of people, wherever they may be, will affect our long-range welfare, just as though they were our own people.

  • Unused ability, like unused muscles, will atrophy.

  • The mind must be trained, rather than the memory.

  • Of all the nations in the Western world, the United States, with the most money and the most time, has the fewest readers of books per capita. This is an incalculable loss. This, too, is one of the few civilized nations in the world which is unable to support a single magazine devoted solely to books.

  • The word communist, of course, has become a rallying cry for certain people here just as the word Jew was in Hitler's Germany, a way of arousing emotion without engendering thought.

  • What you don't do can be a destructive force.

  • Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word. ... We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.

  • This I know. This I believe with all my heart. If we want a free and a peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being — we can do it!

  • I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Today's Health ()
  • I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • letter to Harry S. Truman (1948), in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • ... it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • radio broadcast (1951), in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • ... I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • letter to Bernard Baruch (1952), in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • ... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin ()
  • Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • We must be willing to learn the lesson that cooperation may imply compromise, but if it brings a world advance it is a gain for each individual nation.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • ... a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • Franklin [D. Roosevelt] had a good way of simplifying things. He made people feel that he had a real understanding of things and they felt they had about the same understanding.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • We cannot exist as a little island of well-being in a world where two-thirds of the people go to bed hungry every night.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • When you cease to make a contribution you begin to die.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • You seem to think that everyone can save money if they have the character to do it. As a matter of fact, there are innumerable people who have a wide choice between saving and giving their children the best possible opportunities. The decision is usually in favor of the children.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone ()
  • I have often felt that I cheated my children a little. I was never so totally theirs are most mothers are. I gave to audiences what belonged to my children, got back from audiences the love my children longed to give to me.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Liz Smith, The Mother's Book ()
  • When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Joseph P. Lash, Life Was Meant to Be Lived ()
  • Men have to be reminded that women exist.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • on a list she gave to President Kennedy of women qualified for high-level jobs, in Judith Paterson, Be Somebody: A Biography of Marguerite Rawalt ()
  • Strange to say, conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1939, My Day, vol. 1 ()
  • One has to live in Washington to know what a city of rumors it is.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1945, My Day, vol. 1 ()
  • It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1946, My Day, vol. 2 ()
  • This is ... a trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree that we do — namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anything but the most generous and harmless intentions.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1946, My Day, vol. 2 ()
  • ... the fundamental right of freedom of thought and expression is essential. If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1947, My Day, vol. 2 ()
  • Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1947, My Day, vol. 2 ()
  • I received a most amusing postcard the other morning. Unfortunately, it was not signed in a readable manner so I cannot answer it privately. But it comes from Moblie, Ala., and says: 'Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: You have not answered my question, the amount of Negro blood you have in your veins, if any.' I am afraid none of us know how much nor what kind of blood we have in our veins, since chemically it is all the same. And most of us cannot trace our ancestry more than a few generations.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1956, My Day, vol. 3 ()
  • If we do not pay for children in good schools, then we are going to pay for them in prisons and mental hospitals.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1958, My Day, vol. 3 ()
  • We are given in our newspapers and on TV and radio exactly what we, the public, insist on having, and this very frequently is mediocre information and mediocre entertainment.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1959, My Day, vol. 3 ()
  • Strength that goes wrong is even more dangerous than weakness that goes wrong.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1959, My Day, vol. 3 ()
  • Mr. [Richard M.] Nixon never has anything but hindsight.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • 1960, My Day, vol. 3 ()
  • There is no experience from which you can't learn something ... And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience for the adventure of life.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt: 1884-1932, vol. 1 ()
  • It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experiences behind him.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Most of the work that's done in the world gets done by people who weren't feeling all that well at the time that they did it.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • If you approach each new person you meet in a spirit of adventure you will find yourself endlessly fascinated by the new channels of thought and experience and personality that you encounter.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • No one from the beginning of time has had security.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • I say to the young: Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the torture of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • One thing life taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • The surest way to make it hard for children is to make it easy for them.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • A woman is like a teabag. You never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • A day out-of-doors, someone I loved to talk with, a good book and some simple food and music — that would be rest.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Life has got to be lived — that's all there is to it. At seventy, I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You have that 'This, too, shall pass!'

  • Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds discuss personalities.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • One thing is sure — none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring.

  • In the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely and then act boldly.

  • During prohibition I observed the law meticulously, but I came gradually to see that laws are only observed with the consent of the individuals concerned and a moral change still depends on the individual and not on the passage of any law.

  • Understanding is a two-way street.

    • Eleanor Roosevelt,
    • in Life ()
  • With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

Eleanor Roosevelt, U.S. first lady, writer, humanitarian

(1884 - 1962)

Full name: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt