Eleanor Roosevelt

Do one thing every day that scares you.

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.

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

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

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

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

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.

Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.