Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

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.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say
yes.

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.

The freedom of man, I contend, is the freedom to eat.

Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it.

I have never believed that war settled anything satisfactorily, but I am not entirely sure that some times there are certain situations in the world such as we have in actuality when a country is worse off when it does not go to war for its principles than if it went to war.

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

I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do ...

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

Sometimes it is extremely good for you to forget that there is anything in the world which needs to be done, and to do some particular thing that you want to do. Every human being needs a certain amount of time in which he can be peaceful.

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.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

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.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

The hard part of loving is that one has to learn so often to let go of those we love, so they can do things, so they can grow, so they can return to us with an even richer, deeper love.

Success in marriage depends on being able, when you get over being in love, to really love.

We need not fear any isms if our democracy is achieving the ends for which it was established ...

I shall either find a way, or make one (attributed)

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

You achieve strength, braveness and confidence by each experience in which you really halt to search dread during the deal with

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.

This living in a democracy is a problem, isn't it?

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.

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.

Perhaps in His wisdom the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building.

There is nothing to regret - either for those who go or for those who are left behind

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

A guest is really good or bad because of the host or hostess who makes being a guest an easy or a difficult task.

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

One curious feature about political reform is that so many people feel it is "disloyal" to attempt to rectify the abuses in one's own party. And yet it is obvious that political morality is dependent upon the awakened conscience and private morality of the voters. Such "disloyalty" is simply an evidence of loyalty to principle.

No leader can be too far ahead of his followers.

If quitting smoking seems hard right now, it is exactly what you should start doing

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

It is curious how much more interest can be evoked by a mixture of gossip, romance and mystery than by facts.

I do not think that I am a natural born mother ... If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.

Today is the oldest you've ever been, and the youngest you'll ever be again.

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

Life is meant to be lived.

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.

Women are like tea bags.They do not know how strong they are until they get into hot water.

You need not be proud of me ... I'm only being active till you can be again
it isn't such a great desire on my part to serve theworld and I'll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily!

Poor minds talk about people average minds talk about events great minds talk about ideas

Sailors have the cleanest bodies and the filthiest minds.

So, after all, we are but puppets, creatures of our fate, not commanding it but being molded by it.

the toe of an enormous and heroic

Any citizen should be willing to give all that he has to give his country in work or sacrifice in times of crisis.

It is today that we create the world of the future.

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.

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

It is, I am afraid, true that frequently various religious groups endeavor to exert pressures and control over different legislative and educational fields. It is the job of all of us to be alert for such infringement of our prerogatives and prevent any such attempts from being successful. Like all our freedoms, this freedom from religious-group pressure must be constantly defended. What seemed to me most deplorable

The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government ...

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.

America is not a pile of goods, more luxury, more comforts, a better telephone system, a greater number of cars. America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average man and, if we can not obtain it, all our other
achievements amount to nothing.

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.

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.

If everything was in your favor, if you did not have to surmount any great mountains, then you have nothing to be proud of. But if you feel that you have special difficulties, then you must indeed be proud of your achievement.

The important thing is neither your nationality nor the religion you professed, but how your faith translated itself in your life.

Only I can let you disrepect me! Eleanore Roosevelt

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude

I believe that it is essential to our leadership in the world and to the development of true democracy in our country to have no discrimination in our country whatsoever. This is most important in the schools of our country.

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.

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.

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.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

It has been a long fight to put the control of our economic system in the hands of the government.

Comparison is the thief of all joy.

Caring comes from being able to put yourself in the position of the other person.

I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democrac.

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

I do not think I will ever become deadened, because I live in other people's lives, I must admit there are times when it weighs medown because I can't do some of the things I want.

Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

If you prepare yourself at every point as well as you can, with whatever means you may have, however meager they may seem, you will be able to grasp opportunity for broader experience when it appears. Without preparation you cannot do it.

I can't tell you how to succeed, but I can tell you how to fail: Try to please everybody.

I'm sure that all the drivers and motorcycle police had once been racing drivers and were eager to get back to that profession.

Get ahead of whom? There is no one I want to shove past. I just want to get ahead of myself, make myself as big as I can, but not measure myself by someone else.

What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?

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.

It is harder to be philosophical when you are young.

If someone betrays you once, it's their fault; if they betray you twice, it's your fault.

Make the most of What you have, When you have it, Where you are.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

Light a candle instead of cursing the darkness.

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

Occasionally he took us on a picnic or a camping trip and taught us many valuable lessons. The chief one was to remember that camping was a good way to find out people's characters. Those who were selfish showed it very soon, in that they wanted the best bed or the best food and did not want to do their share of the work.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

Men have to be reminded that women exist.

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.

We must do what we think we can't do.

Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist.

I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you.

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

There is no experience from which you can't learn something.

We must know what we think and speak out, even at the risk of unpopularity.

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.

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

All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished.

Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one's world.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

I believe that it is a great mistake not to stand up for people, even when you differ with them, if you feel that they are trying to do things that will help our country.