Top 350 Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

252. “I’m so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

253. “You can’t move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

254. “One thing is for sure-none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

255. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

256. “After the discovery in 1918 of love letters revealing that Franklin was involved with Lucy Mercer: The bottom dropped out of my own particular world, I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

— Eleanor Roosevelt

259. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

260. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

261. “Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

262. “If everything was in your favor, if you did not have to surmount any great mountains, then you have nothing to be proud of. But if you feel that you have special difficulties, then you must indeed be proud of your achievement.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

263. “Marriage and the up-bringing of children in the home require as well-trained a mind and as well-disciplined a character as any other occupation that might be considered a career.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

264. “So, after all, we are but puppets, creatures of our fate, not commanding it but being molded by it.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

265. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

266. “It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

— Eleanor Roosevelt

269. “I think that if the atomic bomb did nothing more, it scared the people to the point where they realized that either they must do something about preventing war or there is a chance that there might be a morning when we would not wake up.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

270. “The word communist, of course, has become a rallying cry for certain people here just as the word Jew was in Hitler’s Germany, a way of arousing emotion without engendering thought.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

271. “Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

272. “The more we simplify our material needs the more we are free to think of other things.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

273. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

274. “Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

275. “Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

276. “It is very difficult to have a free, fair and honest press anywhere in the world. In the first place, as a rule, papers are largely supported by advertising, and that immediately gives the advertisers a certain hold over the medium they use.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

277. “We must know what we think and speak out, even at the risk of unpopularity.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

278. “I have a great belief in spiritual force, but I think we have to realize that spiritual force alone has to have material force with it so long as we live in a material world. The two together make a strong combination.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

279. “We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

280. “Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without being related to you and repeatedly questioning why you’re in nonprofit.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

281. “If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

282. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

283. “The motivating force of the theory of a Democratic way of life is still a belief that as individuals we live cooperatively, and, to the best of our ability, serve the community in which we live...”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

284. “The trouble is that not enough people have come together with the firm determination to live the things which they say they believe.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

285. “To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

286. “I could never say in the morning, “I have a headache and cannot do thus and so”. Headache or no headache, thus and so had to be done.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

287. “The economy of communism is an economy which grows in an atmosphere of misery and want.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

288. “It is equality of monotony which makes the strength of the British Isles.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

289. “I do not want church groups controlling the schools of our country. They must remain free.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

290. “The kind of man who thinks that helping with the dishes is beneath him will also think that helping with the baby is beneath him, and then he certainly is not going to be a very successful father.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

291. “A candle can bring light to a dungeon but it can also be used to light a deadly marijuana cigarette.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

292. “I’m sure that all the drivers and motorcycle police had once been racing drivers and were eager to get back to that profession.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

293. “It seems to me that I cannot afford, as a self-respecting individual, to refuse to do a thing merely because it will make me disliked or bring down a storm of criticism on my head.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

— Eleanor Roosevelt

295. “When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future of the world, the fact remains that people fight these wars.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

— Eleanor Roosevelt

297. “If we fail to meet our problems here, no one else in the world will do so. If we fail, the heart goes out of progressives throughout the world.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

298. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

299. “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.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

300. “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government...”

— Eleanor Roosevelt