Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.

There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

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!'

Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without being related to you and repeatedly questioning why you're in nonprofit.

You [future first ladies] will feel that you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument.

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.

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?

Develop a skin as thick as a rhinoceros hide!

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.

The future is literally in our hands to mold as we like. But we cannot wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow is now.

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

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

The trouble is that not enough people have come together with the firm determination to live the things which they say they believe.

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

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 maps of the world ... 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.

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.

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.

Staying aloof is not a solution, it is a cowardly evasion.

About the only value the story of my life may have is to show that one can, even without any particular gifts, overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable if one is willing to face the fact that they must be overcome.

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.

This is a strange, little, complacent country [Switzerland], in many ways a USA in miniature but of course nearer the center of disturbance!

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

The basis of all good human behavior is kindness.

Comparison is the thief of all joy.

The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.

Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president.

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.

I believe that all that we go through here must have some value.

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.

Choose a challenge instead of competence

No one can insult you without your permission.

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

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

It is not more vacation we need — it is more vocation.

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

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

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.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.... The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

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

If human beings can be trained for cruelty and greed and a belief in power which comes through hate and fear and force, certainly we can train equally well for greatness and mercy and the power of love which comes because of the strength of the good qualities to be found in the soul of every human being.

Basically we could not have peace, or an atmosphere in which peace could grow, unless we recognized the rights of individual human beings... their importance, their dignity... and agreed that was the basic thing that had to be accepted throughout the world.

... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.

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.

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.

...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 leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.

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

I have a great objection to seeing anyone, particularly anyone whom I care about, lose his self-control.