Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

214 Sourced Quotes

One should always sleep in all of one's guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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.

Eleanor Roosevelt
If you can develop this ability to see what you look at, to understand its meaning, to readjust your knowledge to this new information, you can continue to learn and to grow as long as you live and you'll have a wonderful time doing it.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Ability is not something to be saved, like money, in the hope that you can draw interest on it. The interest comes from the spending. Unused ability, like unused muscles, will atrophy.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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.

Eleanor Roosevelt
No human being can ever 'own' another, whether in friendship, love, marriage, or parenthood.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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 would be curiosity.

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

Eleanor Roosevelt
Little by little it dawned upon me that this law was not making people drink any less, but it was making hypocrites and law breakers of a great number of people. It seemed to me best to go back to the old situation in which, if a man or woman drank to excess, they were injuring themselves and their immediate family and friends and the act was a violation against their own sense of morality and no violation against the law of the land.

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
The economy of communism is an economy which grows in an atmosphere of misery and want.

Eleanor Roosevelt
This is a time for action — not for war, but for mobilization of every bit of peace machinery. It is also a time for facing the fact that you cannot use a weapon, even though it is the weapon that gives you greater strength than other nations, if it is so destructive that it practically wipes out large areas of land and great numbers of innocent people.

Eleanor Roosevelt
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Eleanor Roosevelt
We should begin in our own environment and in our own community as far as possible to build a peace-loving attitude and learn to discipline ourselves to accept, in the small things of our lives, mediation and arbitration. As individuals, there is little that any of us can do to prevent an accidental use of bombs in the hands of those who already have them. We can register, however, with our government a firm protest against granting the knowledge and the use of these weapons to those who do not now have them.

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

Eleanor Roosevelt
I have waited a while before saying anything about the Un-American Activities Committee's current investigation of the Hollywood film industry. I would not be very much surprised if some writers or actors or stagehands, or what not, were found to have Communist leanings, but I was surprised to find that, at the start of the inquiry, some of the big producers were so chicken-hearted about speaking up for the freedom of their industry.
One thing is 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. Certainly, the Thomas Committee is growing more ludicrous daily.

Eleanor Roosevelt
The greatest luxury I know is sitting up reading in bed.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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 is own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

Eleanor Roosevelt
A consciousness of the fact that war means practically total destruction is the reason, I think, for the rising tide to prevent what seems such a senseless procedure. I understand that it is perhaps difficult for some people, whose lives have been lived with a sense of the need for military development, to envisage the possibility of being no longer needed. But the average citizen is beginning to think more and more of the need to develop machinery to settle difficulties in the world without destruction or the use of atomic bombs.

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

Eleanor Roosevelt
For instance, it is certain that women do not want a woman for President. Nor would they have the slightest confidence in her ability to fulfill the functions of that office.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are and then make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else's lie, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself.

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

Eleanor Roosevelt
No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.

Eleanor Roosevelt
It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.

Eleanor Roosevelt
When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

Eleanor Roosevelt
How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions.

Eleanor Roosevelt