Eleanor Roosevelt

Truth: Eleanor Roosevelt


Eleanor Roosevelt 

Humanitarian, Social Reformer

(1884-1962)

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

 

Additional Quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt

  • A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
  • A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.
  • Actors are one family over the entire world.
  • Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.
  • Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.
  • Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
  • As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry is own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
  • Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
  • Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
  • Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
  • Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.
  • Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.
  • I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.
  • I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
  • I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.
  • I once 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.

Biography

Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City, the daughter of a society beauty and an adored, but detached, father, and the niece of the former president, Theodore Roosevelt. As a young woman she seemed to prefer service as a volunteer in a Settlement House to the usual diversions of the socially prominent.

Her marriage to a distant cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, in 1905 brought her a large family to raise and, in 1921, a disabled husband to care for. With her encouragement, her husband returned to politics, becoming, first, Governor of New York and, in 1933 when the country was paralyzed by economic depression, President.

Although her husband's position provided her with a platform not available to most reformers, Eleanor Roosevelt's use of her opportunities to promote better housing, more humane working conditions and racial justice was distinctly her own. She wrote a daily newspaper column, spoke on the radio and traveled the country to observe and report about the plight of the forgotten poor. During World War II she made many trips overseas on behalf of her country and, at war's end and after the death of her husband, she was a delegate to the United Nations and, in 1946, became chairman of the Commission on Human Rights.

Eleanor Roosevelt's efforts to help the powerless often invited scorn and cruel mockery from those who did not share her vision of social justice. She wrote in her newspaper column, “My Day,” in 1937: “Without equality there can be no democracy.” When equality's enemies ridiculed her activism, she said, ”Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you'll be criticized anyway.”

 

 

Eleanor Roosevelt

It isn't enough to talk about peace...one must work for it.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884. Her father was Elliott Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt's younger brother and her mother was Anna Hall, a descendent of the Livingstons, a distinguished New York family. Both her parents died when she was a child, her mother in 1892, and her father in 1894. After her mother's death, Eleanor lived with her grandmother, Mrs. Valentine G. Hall, in Tivoli, New York. She was educated by private tutors until age 15, when she was sent to Allenswood, a school for girls in England, whose headmistress, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, had a great influence on her education and thinking. At age 18, Eleanor Roosevelt returned to New York where she resided with cousins. During that time she became involved in social service work, joined the Junior League and taught at the Rivington street Settlement House.

On March 17, 1905, she married her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and between 1906 and 1916, they became the parents of six children, all of whom are deceased -- the first Franklin Delano, Jr. (1909), Anna Eleanor (1975), John (1981), Franklin Delano, Jr. (1988), Elliott (1990), and James (1991). During this period her public activities gave way to family concerns and her husband's political career. However, with American entry in World War I, she became active in the American Red Cross and in volunteer work in Navy hospitals. After Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with polio in 1921, Mrs. Roosevelt became increasingly active in politics both to help him maintain his interests and to assert her own personality and goals. She participated in the League of Women Voters, joined the Women's Trade Union League, and worked for the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. She helped to found Val-Kill Industries, a nonprofit furniture factory in Hyde Park, New York, and taught at the Todhunter School, a private girls' school in New York City.

During Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt was an active First Lady who traveled extensively around the nation, visiting relief projects, surveying working and living conditions, and then reporting her observations to the President. She also exercised her own political and social influence; she became an advocate of the rights and needs of the poor, of minorities, and of the disadvantaged. In World War II, she visited England and the South Pacific to foster good will among the Allies and boost the morale of US servicemen overseas.

After President Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945, Mrs. Roosevelt continued public life. She was appointed by President Truman to the United States Delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, a position she held until 1953. She was chairman of the Human Rights Commission during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

In 1953, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned from the United States Delegation to the United Nations and volunteered her services to the American Association for the United Nations. She was an American representative to the World Federation of the United Nations Associations, and later became the chairman of the Associations' Board of Directors. She was reappointed to the United States Delegation to the United Nations by President Kennedy in 1961. Kennedy also appointed her as a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps and chairman of the President's Commission on the Status of Women. Mrs. Roosevelt received many awards for her humanitarian efforts.

Eleanor Roosevelt was in real demand as a speaker and lecturer, both in person and through the media of radio and television. She was a prolific writer with many articles and books to her credit including a multi-volume autobiography. In late 1935, she began a syndicated column, "My Day," which she continued until shortly before her death. She also wrote monthly question and answer columns for the Ladies Home Journal (1941-49) and McCalls (1949-62).

In her later years, Mrs. Roosevelt lived at Val-kill in Hyde Park, Dutchess County, New York. She also maintained an apartment in New York City where she died on November 7, 1962. She is buried alongside her husband in the rose garden of their estate at Hyde Park, now a national historic site.

Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/erbio.html

 

 

Quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt

  • People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
  • No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
  • You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
  • The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
  • One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.
  • Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
  • Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.
  • It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.
  • If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault.
  • I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
  • I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.
  • Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
  • 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.

 

Quotes from Major-General Kensaku Oda to Russian War Oath

 

Major-General Kensaku Oda

Most of the men are stricken with dysentery….Starvation is taking many lives and it is weakening our already extended lines.  We are doomed.

 

       

Admiral Takijiro Onishi

If they (the young pilots) are on land, they would be bombed down, and if they are in the air, they would be shot down.  That’s sad…Too sad….To let the young men die beautifully, that’s what Tokko is.  To give beautiful death, that’s called sympathy.

 

Akira Onogi

We took care of the people around us by using the clothes of dead people as bandages, especially for those who were terribly wounded. By that time we somehow became insensible to all those awful things. After a while, the fire reached the river bank and we decided to leave the river. We crossed over this railway bridge and escaped in the direction along the railway. The houses on both sides of the railroad were burning and railway was the hollow in the fire. I thought I was going to die here. It was such an awful experience. You know for about 10 years after bombing I always felt paralyzed we never saw the sparks made by trains or lightning. Also even at home, I could not sit beside the windows because I had seen so many people badly wounded by pieces of glass. So I always sat with the wall behind me for about 10 years. It was some sort of instinct to self-preservation.

 


J. Robert Oppenheimer

The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

 

I become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.
                             - J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Hindu Scriptures after the first atomic bomb detonation.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8w3Y-dskeg


 

General George Patton

The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his. 

 

We want to get the hell over there. The quicker we clean up this Goddamned mess, the quicker we can take a little jaunt against the purple pissing Japs and clean out their nest, too. Before the Goddamned Marines get all of the credit.

 

Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I'd shoot a snake!

 

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

 

There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again. You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON'T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, "Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana." No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, "Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton.

 

Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. 

 

Never in history has the navy landed an army at the planned time and place. But if you land us anywhere within 50 miles of Fedela and within one week of D-Day. I'll go ahead and win.

 

Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain

The Axis Powers and France have an identical interest in seeing the defeat of England accomplished as soon as possible. Consequently, the French Government will support, within the limits of its ability, the measures which the Axis Powers may take to this end.

 

I make to France the gift of my person, to attenuate her suffering... The combat must cease....

--Spoken on a radio broadcast before he signed the armistice between France and Germany.

 

Lieutenant General Lewis B. Chesty Puller

All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us…they can’t get away this time.

 

General Rokossovski

The situation of your troops is desperate. They are suffering from hunger, sickness and cold. The cruel winter has scarcely begun. Hard frosts, cold winds and blizzards still lie ahead. Your soldiers are not provided with winter clothing and are living in appalling sanitary conditions. Your situation is hopeless, and any further resistance senseless.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpVFoIzCU50


 


Field Marshall Erwin Rommel

The enemy must be annihilated before he reaches our main battlefield...We must stop him in the water...destroying all his equipment while it is still afloat.

 

The battle is going very heavily against us.  We’re being crushed by the enemy weight….We are facing very difficult days, perhaps the most difficult that a man can undergo.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyoZQP5C-Q4

 

Anyone who fights, even with the most modern weapons, against an enemy who dominates the air, is like a primitive warrior who stands against modern forces, with the same limitations and the same chance of success.


 

Eleanor Roosevelt

For it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

 

All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished.

 

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

 

Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.

 

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war. 

             

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt 

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan...As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense...With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounded determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.

 

They have given their sons to the military services. They have stoked the furnaces and hurried the factory wheels. They have made the planes and welded the tanks.  Riveted the ships and rolled the shells.

 

[Mariners] have written one of its most brilliant chapters. They have delivered the goods when and where needed in every theater of operations and across every ocean in the biggest, the most difficult and dangerous job ever undertaken. As time goes on, there will be greater public understanding of our merchant's fleet record during this war [World War II].

 

The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

                                                                                                   –Comment made after Italy invaded France  

 

On the European Front the most important development of the past year (1942) has been the crushing offensive of the Great Armies of Russia….

 

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.

 

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars - yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.

 

Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged. 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-weBUzQleo

 

 

 

Russian War Oath

For the burned cities and villages; for the deaths of our children and our mothers; for the torture and humiliation of our people; I swear revenge upon the enemy… I swear that I would rather die in battle with the enemy then surrender myself my people and my country to the Fascist invaders.  Blood for blood!  Death for death!