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.

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.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

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.

You never have a normal family relationship in the White House; it's an impossible thing to have. You live in a goldfish bubble, and you snatch what you can for a personal life, but you never have a normal, natural existence.

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

I was perfectly certain that I had nothing to offer of an individual nature and that my only chance of doing my duty as the wife of a public official was to do exactly as the majority of women were doing.