Quotes / Thinkers / Eleanor Roosevelt
Thinker · 24 quotes
24 sourced quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt on relationships & friendship, democracy & freedom, education & knowledge, peace, non-violence & conflict, culture, art & literature, with a use case for each in GS4, Essay and interviews.
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I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could. (8 November 1944)
Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth. (22 August 1944)
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself. (15 June 1946)
Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people? (16 October 1939)
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. (1 July 1940)
What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.
One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted. (11 May 1943)
Human resources are the most valuable assets the world has. They are all needed desperately.
It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.
No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. (20 December 1939)
The arts in every field — music, drama, sculpture, painting — we can learn to appreciate and enjoy. We need not be artists, but we should be able to appreciate the work of artists. (5 November 1958)
When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
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. (23 February 1940)
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.
The purpose of life...is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
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.
We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.
Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
Understanding is a two-way street.
The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.
One of the blessings of age is to learn not to part on a note of sharpness, to treasure the moments spent with those we love, and to make them whenever possible good to remember, for time is short. (5 February 1943)
If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people. (5 November 1958)