Quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt

The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.

I'm so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!

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.

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

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

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.

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.

I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

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

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

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.

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.

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.

Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we are in hot water!

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

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.

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.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

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.