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.

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 used to tell my husband that, if he could make me 'understand' something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

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

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours - and I think probably gave me many nightmares.

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

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.

The mother of a family should look upon her housekeeping and the planning of meals as a scientific occupation.

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.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

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.

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

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

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.

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

What you don't do can be a destructive force.

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