Eleanor Roosevelt

“If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.”

“Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.”

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

“I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.”

“With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.”

“You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you've become yourself.”

“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.”

“Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.”

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'”

“It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.”

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

“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.”

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

“We have to make these young people (of the Depression) feel that they are necessary. (They should be given) "certain things for which youth craves – the chance for self-sacrifice for an ideal.”

“Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.”

“When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.”

“I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democrac.”

“Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.”

“Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.”