Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

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.

I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions.

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

We don't become heroes overnight." - One step at a time, eventually discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

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

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.

When it's better for everyone, it's better for everyone.

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.

It is so much easier to be enthusiastic than to reason!

The kind of propaganda that some of the religious groups, aided and abetted by the opposition, put forth in that campaign utterly disgusted me. If I needed anything to show me what prejudice can do to the intelligence of human beings that campaign was the best lesson I could have had.

I'm intensely anxious to preserve the freedom that gives you the right to think and to act and to talk as you please. That I think is essential to happiness and the life of the people.

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.

You in the unions do not yet represent all of labor. But I hope some day you will, because I believe that it is through strength, through the fact that people who know what people need are working to make this country a better place for all people, that we will help the world to accept our leadership and understand that, under our form of government and through our way of life, we have something to offer them.

Because they have so little, children must rely on imagination rather than experience.

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

A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.

Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.

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

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.

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.

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

You do the things that need to be done according to priority.

Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.

I never thought of achievement. I just did what came along for me to do - the thing that gave me the most pleasure.

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.

Somehow we must be able to show people that democracy is not about words, but action.

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.

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.

...conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand.

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.

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.

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.

All of life is a constant education.

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.

It's your life-but only if you make it so.

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.

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands.

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.

The mind must be trained, rather than the memory.

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.

Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church.