United States First Ladies

"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."

"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."

"Understanding is a two-way street."

"Oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me or I wouldn't be wearing it!"

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be "damned if you do, and damned if you don't.""

"I think of Eleanor Roosevelt as a woman of such human and uncompromising qualities that they make her not just in name but truly the first lady of the land."

"such courageous spirits as Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt."

"Part of my job in Noumea consisted in briefing frequent important visitors. One was Mrs. Roosevelt, who had tried unsuccessfully to visit us on Guadalcanal. She now turned up sporting a letter from the President to Halsey and me- she would go to the island provided we could take satisfactory security precautions, which we did. Eleanor Roosevelt was a remarkable woman, seemingly tireless during her frequent peregrinations. When Halsey and I met her in Noumea we proposed to take her to the Red Cross center where she could comfortably rest from her long flight. No, indeed- she insisted on going directly to the nearest hospital. She spent the bulk of her time in new Caledonia visiting our sick and wounded, talking to them by the hundreds. In each case she took the man's home address and upon her return to America wrote his family."

"She thought of herself as an ugly duckling, but she walked in beauty in the ghettos of the world, bringing with her the reminder of her beloved St. Francis, "It is in the giving that we receive." And wherever she walked beauty was forever there."

"I have lost more than a beloved friend. I have lost an inspiration. She would rather light candles than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world."

"Besides giving me the most interesting job I could possibly imagine, the Women's Trade League brought many wonderful friends into my life. Among them were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. I first met her when I was raising money for the League clubhouse. She called me her teacher, for she said I taught her all she knew about trade unionism. Always generous and understanding, she never refused me anything I asked for. This is quite a statement coming from me because, though I find it hard to ask for things for myself, I could ask for the moon if I needed it for the League. For twelve weeks during the depression, when we were having a hard time meeting our obligations, she shared her broadcasting fees with us. That $300 each week kept us going at a time when many of our supporters, hard-hit by the stock-market crash, could not help us."

"I buy 100 copies at a time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was Eleanor Roosevelt's great work...I sometimes, if it's an adult audience, ask how many of them are familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most highly educated people have never read it. It's a tragic erasure of our heritage. It was such a time of hope. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes economic rights."

"Her real need to be of service overcame the hurt caused by her critics however, and she worked tirelessly all the years of Franklin's presidency. When he died she filled the void by working all the more. She had believed that When she was out of the White House there would he nothing more for her to do, "because she considered herself as an auxiliary to her husband and felt that her own value had been as First lady, not Eleanor Roosevelt. President Truman felt otherwise however, prevailing upon her to work for the newly formed United Nations. She spent the last years of her life travelling and working for the possibility of permanent world peace... she never stinted on her own time, energy, money, or compassion to help a stranger in need. Her greatness was in her kindness and empathy not, as her critics often pointed out, in her intellect ... She was given more tributes, medals and awards than any other woman in American history. Her books were translated into all major European languages, including Russian and Serbo Croatian, four Indian dialects and Hebrew, but in spite of all this Eleanor was not satisfied. She judged herself not on what she had accomplished, but what yet remained to be done, commenting that the knowledge of how little one can do alone had taught her humility. So she kept up her struggle against the injustices of the world."

"Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive ... One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been."

"Eleanor Roosevelt came to New York City and I was in a, a contest, a debating contest, and I won the debate in the whole city of New York…I'll never forget this tall woman, her hair in a chignon, and this little porkpie hat on, and she was ugly. She was very ugly. But Eleanor, the moment she opened her mouth, you felt a warmth. It was beautiful."

"We know now, thanks to historian Blanche Weisen Cook, that Eleanor had a very complicated, intimate, most-probably sexual relationship with Lorena Hickok, who was a journalist. At one point, Eleanor moved her into the White House with her. And that Hickok's reporting upon Eleanor Roosevelt was integral to Eleanor Roosevelt's promotion of herself as a social reformer. Along with this, we do know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a wide, wide circle of female friends, many of whom were lesbians, many of whom were involved with social work. These women as an aggregate were called "Roosevelt's Brain Trust." And, in fact, Eleanor brought them to Washington and they were instrumental in forming the New Deal. Francis Perkins, one of Eleanor's intimate friends, was the first woman to head the Labor Department. So I think when we're looking at Eleanor Roosevelt's life, it's not just interesting that she had this affair with a woman-- she also apparently had an affair with her chauffer, named Earl Miller, as well, so Eleanor's life was complicated-- but what is really amazing that there is this circle of friends--which, again, Blanche Weisen Cook calls "female support networks"--that literally changed our very notions of how social work functions in American society and how reform functions. All again based upon lesbian--or women being intimate with women--relationships."

"I believe that women writers have not engaged or been allowed to participate in the discourse of official remembrance and that this is why their literature has been able to capture the frailty of the human spirit as well as its depth. Women writers who have contributed to the softness of remembrance can be traced from the early diary writings of young Anne Frank, to the visionary human rights declaration of Eleanor Roosevelt, and finally, to the powerful denouncing of apartheid by Nadine Gordimer."

"I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday."

"America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed."

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself"

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift... that's why they call it the present."

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

"Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until you put them in hot water."

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

"Example is the best lesson there is."

"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."

"We must know what we think and speak out, even at the risk of unpopularity. In the final analysis, a democratic government represents the sum total of the courage and the integrity of its individuals. It cannot be better than they are. … In the long run there is no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely and then act boldly."

"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."

"Human resources are the most valuable assets the world has. They are all needed desperately."

"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."

"As long as we are not actually destroyed, we can work to gain greater understanding of other peoples and to try to present to the peoples of the world the values of our own beliefs. We can do this by demonstrating our conviction that human life is worth preserving and that we are willing to help others to enjoy benefits of our civilization just as we have enjoyed it. (20 December 1961)"

"We should begin in our own environment and in our own community as far as possible to build a peace-loving attitude and learn to discipline ourselves to accept, in the small things of our lives, mediation and arbitration. As individuals, there is little that any of us can do to prevent an accidental use of bombs in the hands of those who already have them. We can register, however, with our government a firm protest against granting the knowledge and the use of these weapons to those who do not now have them. (20 December 1961)"

"A consciousness of the fact that war means practically total destruction is the reason, I think, for the rising tide to prevent what seems such a senseless procedure. I understand that it is perhaps difficult for some people, whose lives have been lived with a sense of the need for military development, to envisage the possibility of being no longer needed. But the average citizen is beginning to think more and more of the need to develop machinery to settle difficulties in the world without destruction or the use of atomic bombs. (20 December 1961)"

"In times past, the question usually asked by women was "How can we best help to defend our nation?" I cannot remember a time when the question on so many people's lips was "How can we prevent war?" There is a widespread understanding among the people of this nation, and probably among the people of the world, that there is no safety except through the prevention of war. For many years war has been looked upon as almost inevitable in the solution of any question that has arisen between nations, and the nation that was strong enough to do so went about building up its defenses and its power to attack. It felt that it could count on these two things for safety. (20 December 1961)"

"If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively. For people to have more time to read, to take part in their civic obligations, to know more about how their government functions and who their officials are might mean in a democracy a great improvement in the democratic processes. Let's begin, then, to think how we can prepare old and young for these new opportunities. Let's not wait until they come upon us suddenly and we have a crisis that we will be ill prepared to meet. (5 November 1958)"

"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)"

"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)"

"This is a time for action — not for war, but for mobilization of every bit of peace machinery. It is also a time for facing the fact that you cannot use a weapon, even though it is the weapon that gives you greater strength than other nations, if it is so destructive that it practically wipes out large areas of land and great numbers of innocent people. (16 April 1954 )"

"The mobilization of world opinion and methods of negotiation should be developed and used by every nation in order to strengthen the United Nations. Then if we are forced into war, it will be because there has been no way to prevent it through negotiation and the mobilization of world opinion. In which case we should have the voluntary support of many nations, which is far better than the decision of one nation alone, or even of a few nations. (16 April 1954)"

"What is going on in the Un-American Activities Committee worries me primarily because little people have become frightened and we find ourselves living in the atmosphere of a police state, where people close doors before they state what they think or look over their shoulders apprehensively before they express an opinion. I have been one of those who have carried the fight for complete freedom of information in the United Nations. And while accepting the fact that some of our press, our radio commentators, our prominent citizens and our movies may at times be blamed legitimately for things they have said and done, still I feel that the fundamental right of freedom of thought and expression is essential. If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do. In our country we must trust the people to hear and see both the good and the bad and to choose the good. The Un-American Activities Committee seems to me to be better for a police state than for the USA. (29 October 1947)"

"The film industry is a great industry with infinite possibilities for good and bad. Its primary purpose is to entertain people. On the side, it can do many other things. It can popularize certain ideals, it can make education palatable. But in the long run, the judge who decides whether what it does is good or bad is the man or woman who attends the movies. In a democratic country I do not think the public will tolerate a removal of its right to decide what it thinks of the ideas and performances of those who make the movie industry work. (29 October 1947)"

"I have waited a while before saying anything about the Un-American Activities Committee's current investigation of the Hollywood film industry. I would not be very much surprised if some writers or actors or stagehands, or what not, were found to have Communist leanings, but I was surprised to find that, at the start of the inquiry, some of the big producers were so chicken-hearted about speaking up for the freedom of their industry. One thing is 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. Certainly, the Thomas Committee is growing more ludicrous daily. (29 October 1947)"

"It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself. (15 June 1946)"

"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)"

"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)"

"At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want — for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war. (15 April 1943)"

"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)"

"Long ago, I made up my mind that when things were said involving only me, I would pay no attention to them, except when valid criticism was carried by which I could profit. (14 January 1942)"