Quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt

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

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

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.

I do not think that I am a natural born mother... If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.

The freedom of man, I contend, is the freedom to eat.

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.

There is a desire for progress in the hearts of all men, and it is the sense of frustration and inability to move forward that brings violent revolution.

No, I have never wanted to be a man. I have often wanted to be more effective as a woman, but I have never felt that trousers would do the trick!

If it's a man's game so decidedly that a woman would be soiled by entering it, then there is something radically wrong with the American game of politics.

I know that given great responsibility men sometimes change, but Mr. Nixon's Presidency would worry me.

This living in a democracy is a problem, isn't it?

Whatever come we have to meet it.

Furnish an example, stop preaching, stop shielding, don't prevent self-reliance and initiative, allow your children to develop along thier own lines.

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.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

I have learned long ago to possess my soul in patience and accept the inevitable.

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

We will have to want peace, want it enough to pay for it, before it becomes an accepted rule.

The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. Love thy neighbor as thyself.

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.

Before we can make friends with anyone else, we must first make friends with ourselves.