Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

214 Sourced Quotes

The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying attention to you.

Eleanor Roosevelt
There is no more precious experience in life than friendship. And I am not forgetting love and marriage as I write this; the lovers, or the man and wife, who are not friends are but weakly joined together. One enlarges his circle of friends through contact with many people. One who limits those contacts narrows the circle and frequently his own point of view as well.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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
I often wonder how we can make the more fortunate in this country fully aware of the fact that the problem of the unemployed is not a mechanical one. It is a problem alive and throbbing with human pain.

Eleanor Roosevelt
What we need in the world is manners... I think that if, instead of preaching brotherly love, we preached good manners, we might get a little further. It sounds less righteous and more practical.

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

Eleanor Roosevelt
I believe in active citizenship, for men and women equally, as a simple matter of right and justice. I believe we will have better government in all of our countries when men and women discuss public issues together and make their decisions on the basis of their different areas of experience and their common concern for the welfare of their families and their world.

Eleanor Roosevelt
As life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to do--I just did it.

Eleanor Roosevelt
I would not be happy unless I had some regular work to do every day and I imagine that I will always feel that way no matter how old I am.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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...

Eleanor Roosevelt
I think we ought to impress on both our girls and boys that successful marriages require just as much work, just as much intelligence and just as much unselfish devotion, as they give to any position they undertake to fill on a paid basis.

Eleanor Roosevelt
It is very difficult to have a free, fair and honest press anywhere in the world. In the first place, as a rule, papers are largely supported by advertising, and that immediately gives the advertisers a certain hold over the medium they use.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Curiously enough, it is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Strength that goes wrong is even more dangerous than weakness that goes wrong.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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.

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

Eleanor Roosevelt
A number of people still think of the United States as being overwhelmingly English, Protestant, and white. This erroneous idea influences their whole outlook.

Eleanor Roosevelt
I found that almost everyone had something interesting to contribute to my education.

Eleanor Roosevelt
A successful life for a man or for a woman seems to me to lie in the knowledge that one has developed to the limit the capacities with which one was endowed; that one has contributed something constructive to family and friends and to a home community; that one has brought happiness wherever it was possible; that one has earned one's way in the world, has kept some friends, and need not be ashamed to face oneself honestly.

Eleanor Roosevelt
A respect for the rights of other peoples to determine their forms of government and their economy will not weaken our democracy. It will inevitably strengthen it.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Any citizen should be willing to give all that he has to give his country in work or sacrifice in times of crisis.

Eleanor Roosevelt
If you take stands in any way and people feel that you have any success in - a following, why those who disagree with you are going to feel very strongly about it.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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.

Eleanor Roosevelt
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.

Eleanor Roosevelt