Eleanor Roosevelt

What is the good of living if not to make the world a better place?

I wonder if we are doing enough thinking about the question of what we want for the young people of the world.

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

I once heard a very wise man say, 'A good leader is not one who makes people do what they want, but one who helps people want to do what is right.'

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.

You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue.

I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.

I have always felt that anyone who wanted an election so much they would use those means did not have the character that I really admired in public life.

One of the first things we must get rid of is the idea that democracy is tantamount to capitalism.

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.

I don't know much about Capitalism, but I do know about Democracy and freedom, and if Capitalism may change in many, many ways, I'm not really very much interested in Capitalism.

When a woman fails, it is much more serious than when a man fails, because the average person attributes that failure not to the individual, but to the fact that she is a woman.

I believe that democracy is based on the ability to make democracy serve the good of the majority of the people. If it can't do that, then it should not survive.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you'll be criticized anyway.

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