Eleanor Roosevelt

Diplomat

1884-10-11 – 1962-11-07

Eleanor Roosevelt was an American diplomat, writer, and political leader who served as First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She later played a central role at the United Nations and helped advance the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that, you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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 democracy.
Read quote
Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.
Read quote
To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
Read quote
Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?
Read quote
No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
Read quote
There is a growing wave in this country of fear, and of intolerance which springs from fear. Sometimes it is a religious intolerance, sometimes it is a racial intolerance, but all intolerance grows from the same roots.
Read quote
You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.
Read quote
All of life is a constant education.
Read quote
You can not live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.
Read quote
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Read quote
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Read quote
Once I 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.
Read quote
Today is the oldest you've ever been, and the youngest you'll ever be again.
Read quote
I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.
Read quote
Light a candle instead of cursing the darkness.
Read quote
It's your life-but only if you make it so.
Read quote