Paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

Do something that scares you everyday. ~ Melina Marchetta

To tell the people in the West not to use their cars means that these people may never see another soul for weeks and weeks nor have a way of getting a sick person to a doctor. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

This freedom of which men speak, for which they fight, seems to some people a perilous thing. It has to be earned at a bitter cost and then - it has to be lived with. For freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

It is, however, the better part of wisdom to regard the mistake as experience which will help guide you in the future, a part, though a painful part, of your education. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

You must do the things you think you cannot do. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Anger is one letter short of danger. ~ 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

Once your children are grown up and have children of their own, the problems are theirs and the less the older generation interferes the better. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

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

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

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

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. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The world conspires to help those who are in love with the beauty of their dreams. ~ 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

I wish with all my heart that every child could be so imbued with a sense of the adventure of life that each change, each readjustment, each surprise
good or bad
that came along would be welcomed as part of the whole enthralling experience. ~ 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

You are very kind and very intelligent and those elements are not always found together. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, and my mother - yes, you belong in that category. Here, give me a kiss. ~ Maya Angelou

We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind, that is the approval by the General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt on the changes in John F. Kennedy that led her to drop her opposition to his nomination for president: He has the qualities of a scholar, and a sense of history. I had the feeling that he was the man who can learn. I like him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little caulk-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas. ~ David Pietrusza

I have often felt that I cheated my children a little. I was never so totally theirs as most mothers are. I gave to audiences whatbelonged to my children, got back from audiences the love my children longed to give me. ~ 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

The next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard? ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

It is always easier to do nothing than to try a new line of action. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Before we can make friends with anyone else, we must first make friends with ourselves. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

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. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

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

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. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt had both her admirers and her detractors. And they admired her and detracted from her for many of the same reasons. People who liked her social activism, who thought that she was calling attention to problems that needed solving, were all for her. ~ William A. Rusher

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

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

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. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

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. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

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. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt loved to write. She was a wonderful child writer. I mean, she wrote beautiful essays and stories as a child. And Marie Souvestre really appreciated Eleanor Roosevelt's talents and encouraged her talents. Also, she spoke perfect French. She grew up speaking French. She's now at a french-speaking school where, you know, girls are coming from all over the world. Not everybody speaks French. ~ Blanche Wiesen Cook

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

They seemed like a team. And I think it is fair to say that Roosevelt was the consummate politician and that Eleanor was the socially conscious activist. It gave them a nice combination of yang and yin, which they took advantage of. And I think it worked very well for them politically. ~ William A. Rusher

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