"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Poor minds talk about people average minds talk about events great minds talk about ideas" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"For our own success to be real, it must contribute to the success of others." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader, a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by doing the thing which you think you cannot do." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her 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
"We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Some people are going to leave a mark on this world, while others will leave a stain." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I can't tell you how to succeed, but I can tell you how to fail: Try to please everybody." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"When you have decided what you believe, what you feel must be done, have the courage to stand alone and be counted" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Caring comes from being able to put yourself in the position of the other person." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If you lose money you lose much, If you lose friends you lose more, If you lose faith you lose all." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Today is the oldest you've ever been, and the youngest you'll ever be again." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Think as little as possible about yourself and as much as possible about other people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The future is literally in our hands to mold as we like. But we cannot wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow is now." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the long run, it is easier." ~ 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
"Before we can make friends with anyone else, we must first make friends with ourselves." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult as it originally was." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Life is like a parachute jump, you've got to get it right the first time." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"When you look fear in the face, you are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'" ~ 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 experience behind him." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Since everybody is an individual, nobody can be you. You are unique. No one can tell you how to use your time. It is yours. Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we are in hot water!" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"We will have to want peace, want it enough to pay for it, before it becomes an accepted rule." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. Love thy neighbor as thyself." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Enjoy every minute you have with those you love, my dear, for no one can take joy that is past away from you. It will be there in your heart to live on when the dark days come." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A number of people still think of the United States as being overwhelmingly English, Protestant, and white. This erroneous idea influences their whole outlook." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The word liberal comes from the word free. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The very next thing you need to be doing is the thing that terrifies you the most." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is a curious thing in human experience, but to live through a period of stress and sorrow with another person, creates a bond which nothing seems able to break." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"No human being can ever "own" another, whether in friendship, love, marriage or parenthood. Many human relationships have been ruined and happiness far too often changed to misery by a failure to understand this." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"Of course, I do not believe in having everyone who is a liberal called a communist, or everyone who is conservative called a fascist." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"One thing life has 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 more we simplify our material needs the more we are free to think of other things." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Friends, you and me... you brought another friend... and then there were three... we started our group... our circle of friends... and like that circle... there is no beginning or end." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying attention to you." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A great deal of fear is a result of just “not knowing.” We do not know what is involved in a new situation. We do not know whether we can deal with it. The sooner we learn what it entails, the sooner we can dissolve our fear." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I think if the people of this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, as against the privileged few" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"No human being can ever 'own' another, whether in friendship, love, marriage, or parenthood." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being - we can do it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"We must know what we think and speak out, even at the risk of unpopularity." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know." ~ 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
"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"The trouble is that not enough people have come together with the firm determination to live the things which they say they believe." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Develop a skin as thick as a rhinoceros hide!" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"On the whole our armed services have been doing pretty well in the way of keeping us defended, but I hope our State Department will remember that it is really the department of achieving peace." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The only joy in this hard life is serving others." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Women are like tea bags: put them in hot water and they get stronger." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The giving of love and understanding is an education in itself." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Women are like tea bags.They do not know how strong they are until they get into hot water." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a real sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"There is nothing to fear except fear it's self." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Some friends leave footprints in your heart" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I never met Mahatma Gandhi, but, I think everyone felt they knew him even if they hadn't met him." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"In our country we must trust the people to hear and see both the good and the bad and to choose the good." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It's your life-but only if you make it so." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"No one can insult you without your permission." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"We mast show by our behavior that we believe in equality and justice and that our religion teaches faith and love and charity to our fellow men. Here is where each of us has a job to do that must be done at home, because we can lose the battle on the soil of the United States just as surely as we can lose it in any one of the countries of the world." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The war for freedom will never really be won because the price of freedom is constant vigilance over ourselves and over our Government." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says: it can't be done." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"To undo a mistake is always harder than not to create one originally but we seldom have the foresight. Therefore we have no choice but to try to correct our past mistakes." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I have always seen life personally; my interest or sympathy or indignation is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person...Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem to the community, then to the country, then to the world." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Change means the unknown." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Understanding is a two-way street." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"This is not a time when women should be patient. We are in a war and we need to fight it with all our ability and every weapon possible. Women pilots, in this particular case, are a weapon waiting to be used." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I carried it (a revolver) religiously and during the summer I asked a friend, a man who had been one of Franklin's bodyguards in New York State, to give me some practice in target shooting so that if the need arose I would know how to use the gun." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"All the water in the world cannot drown you unless it gets inside of you." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"We must want for others, not ourselves alone." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"For all of us, as we grow older, perhaps the most important thing is to keep alive our love of others and to believe that our love and interest are as vitally necessary to them as to us. This is what makes us keep on growing and refills the fountains of energy." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Government exists for one purpose: to make things better for all people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If many of our young people have lost the excitement of the early settlers, who had a country to explore and develop, it is because no one remembers to tell them that the world has never been so challenging, so exciting... Perhaps the older generation is often to blame with its cautious warning: “Take a job that will give you security, not adventure.” But I say to the young: “Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, and imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"All human beings have failings, all human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another's failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves. If at the end one can say, This man used to the limit the powers that God granted him; he was worthy of love and respect and of the sacrifices of many people, made in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task, then that life has been lived well and there are no regrets." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is always disagreeable to take stands. It is always easier to compromise, always easier to let things go. To many women, and I am one of them, it is extraordinarily difficult to care about anything enough to cause disagreement or unpleasant feelings, but I have come to the conclusion that this must be done for a time until we can prove our strength and demand respect for our wishes. We cannot even be of real service in the coming campaign and speak as a united body of women unless we have the respect of men and show that when we express a wish, we are willing to stand by it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want... for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are and then make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else's lie, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The freedom of man, I contend, is the freedom to eat." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person's stature is as large as one's own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It seems to me that it is the basic right of any human being to work." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"We don't become heroes overnight." - One step at a time, eventually discovering we have the strength to stare it down." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"No leader can be too far ahead of his followers." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I think we ought to impress on both our girls and boys that successful marriages require just as much work, just as much intelligence and just as much unselfish devotion, as they give to any position they undertake to fill on a paid basis." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Our real battlefield today is Asia and our real battle is the one between democracy and communism. . . . We have to prove to the world and particularly to downtrodden areas of the world which are the natural prey to the principles of communist economics that democracy really brings about happier and better conditions for the people as a whole." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Sailors have the cleanest bodies and the filthiest minds." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A candle can bring light to a dungeon but it can also be used to light a deadly marijuana cigarette." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.... In any case, the giving of love is an education in itself." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"True hospitality consists of giving the best of yourself to your guests." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I do not want church groups controlling the schools of our country. They must remain free." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"In the long run there is no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely and then act boldly." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is impossible to be a cynic if you live a good deal with young people. Fundamentally, every young person has a feeling that the future is going to hold something of value." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The kind of man who thinks that helping with the dishes is beneath him will also think that helping with the baby is beneath him, and then he certainly is not going to be a very successful father." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Up to a certain point it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I'm so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"What one has to do usually can be done." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"When it's better for everyone, it's better for everyone." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Nobody else is going to do the things which are yours to be done in the world." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I believe you should tell the story of injustices, of inequalities, of bad conditions, so that the people as a whole in this country really face the problems that people who are pushed to the point of striking know all about, but others know practically nothing about." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is not more vacation we need — it is more vocation." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"This is a time for action not for war, but for mobilization of every bit of peace machinery." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Courage is exhilarating." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"One should always sleep in all of one's guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Do whatever comes your way to do as well as you can. Think as little as possible about yourself. Think as much as possible about other people. Dwell on things that are interesting. Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give." ~ 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
"One of the first things we must get rid of is the idea that democracy is tantamount to capitalism." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"You always admire what you really don't understand. - Eleanor Roosevelt" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"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 know that 'this, too, shall pass!'" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"Franklin's illness...gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons - infinite patience and never ending persistence." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one's world." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Obedience may have its uses, but it is no substitute for willing, uncoerced co-operation." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree as 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
"Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I never waste time looking back." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I have learned long ago to possess my soul in patience and accept the inevitable." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Never be bored, and you will never be boring." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I wonder if Communists occupied in producing plays are not safer than Communists starving to death. I have always felt that whatever your beliefs might be, if you could earn enough to keep body and soul together and had to be pretty busy doing that, you would not be very apt to have time to plot the overthrow of any existing government." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"We need not fear any isms if our democracy is achieving the ends for which it was established." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Poverty is an expensive luxury. We cannot afford it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"No one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"To be mature you have to realize what you value most... Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one's own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I shall either find a way, or make one (attributed)" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"We must do that which we think we cannot." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Work is always an antidote to depression." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Choose a challenge instead of competence" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is today that we create the world of the future." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is curious how much more interest can be evoked by a mixture of gossip, romance and mystery than by facts." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If you have any interests you can gain a wider audience for those interests while the goldfish bowl is yours!" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"We need emotional outlets in this country, and the more artistic people we develop the better it will be for us as a nation." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Always be on time. Never try to make any personal engagements. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Never be disturbed by anything. Always do what you're told to do as quickly as possible. Remember to lean back in a parade, so that people can see your husband. Don't get too fat to ride three on a seat. Get out of the way as quickly as you're not needed." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"As life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to do--I just did it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If you must compromise, compromise up." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times - The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The mobilization of world opinion and methods of negotiation should be developed and used by every nation in order to strengthen the United Nations." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is so much easier to be enthusiastic than to reason!" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Mozart, who was buried in a pauper’s grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It has been a long fight to put the control of our economic system in the hands of the government." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"You do the things that need to be done according to priority." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"those who attack always do so with greater fervor than those who defend." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Beautiful old people are works of art." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Life is meant to be lived." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"One thing is for 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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"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." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If you can develop this ability to see what you look at, to understand its meaning, to readjust your knowledge to this new information, you can continue to learn and to grow as long as you live and you’ll have a wonderful time doing it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The film industry is a great industry, with infinite possibilities for good and bad. Its primary purpose is to entertain people. On the side, it can do many other things. It can popularize certain ideals, it can make education palatable. But in the long run, the judge who decides whether what it does is good or bad is the man or woman who attends the movies." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"There is nothing to regret, either for those who go, or for those who stay behind — only an inheritance of good accomplishment to be lived up to by those who carry a loving memory in their hearts." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I'm enormously interested in freedom and retaining the right to have whatever economy we want and to shape it as we want and a having sufficient Democracy so that the people actually hold their Government in their own hands." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Life's not about expecting, hoping and wishing. It's about doing, being and becoming. It's about t Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Every day do something that frightens you." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Whatever come we have to meet it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The motivating force of the theory of a Democratic way of life is still a belief that as individuals we live cooperatively, and, to the best of our ability, serve the community in which we live." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I believe that all that we go through here must have some value." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing is very permanent." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"...but there isn't going to be any First Lady. There is just to be plain, ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt...I never wanted to be the president's wife, and don't want it now. You don't quite believe me, do you? Very likely no one would-except possibly some woman who had had the job." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can only grow as long as we are interested." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"You achieve strength, braveness and confidence by each experience in which you really halt to search dread during the deal with" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"...conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"To some of us, hunger was more academic than real, but we must try to develop the ability to feel the urgency of such a situation." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"A woman has, first of all, her duties in their own home, and there are many women particularly when they're young, who can do an active job in their community like being a mayor, but who cannot go to Washington or Albany or wherever the capital of the state is. There are others who can, can leave home, whose children are older and so forth. I think it all is a personal decision." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"It seems to me that I cannot afford, as a self-respecting individual, to refuse to do a thing merely because it will make me disliked or bring down a storm of criticism on my head." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"If you take stands in any way and people feel that you have any success in - a following, why those who disagree with you are going to feel very strongly about it." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Of course Mahatma Gandhi you might say did not have so much physical vigor but he certainly seemed to have extraordinary resistance, which perhaps is rather different from physical vigor." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The choices we make are ultimately our responsibility." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without being related to you and repeatedly questioning why you're in nonprofit." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Do one thing everyday that scares you. Those small things that make us uncomfortable help us build courage to do the work we do." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Strength that goes wrong is even more dangerous than weakness that goes wrong." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"People who 'view with alarm' never build anything." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you've become yourself." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"Every age is an unknown country." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"You rarely achieve finality. If you did, life would be over, but as you strive new visions open before you, new possibilities for the satisfaction of living." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"There is a desire for progress in the hearts of all men, and it is the sense of frustration and inability to move forward that brings violent revolution." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
"The important thing is neither your nationality nor the religion you professed, but how your faith translated itself in your life." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
