Eleanor Roosevelt

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 lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." . . . You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Advice on campaign behavior for first ladies: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Remember to lean back in the parade so everybody can see the president. Be sure not to get too fat, because you'll have to sit three in the back.

I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

You [future first ladies] will feel that you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument.

Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Perhaps in His wisdom the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building.

Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the moment it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.