We have come to accept bigger and bigger things as meaning greater and greater efficiency, more and more prosperity and more and more freedom. The two do not go together of necessity.
As life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to do--I just did it.
If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.
Sailors have the cleanest bodies and the filthiest minds.
A democratic form of government, a democratic way of life, presupposes free public education over a long period; it presupposes also an education for personal responsibility that too often is neglected.
Never be bored, and you will never be boring.
What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?
Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?
All the water in the world cannot drown you unless it gets inside of you.
One thing is for 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.
Democracy cannot be static. Whatever is static is dead.
Perhaps the basic thing which contributes to charm is the ability to forget oneself and be engrossed in other people.
I think it is impossible for one human being really to know another without first knowing and being at peace with himself.
The things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult as it originally was.
What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.
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.
A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
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.'
It is equality of monotony which makes the strength of the British Isles.
Curiously enough, it is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.
I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.
It is a rather curious thing to have to divide one's life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when one's official duties are at an end.
All of us ... should remember that no amount of flag-waving, pledging allegiance, or fervent singing of the national anthem is evidence that we are patriotic in the real sense of the word. ... Outward behavior, while important, is not the real measure of a man's patriotism.
Whatever come we have to meet it.
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.
It is curious how much more interest can be evoked by a mixture of gossip, romance and mystery than by facts.
I kept praying that I might be able to prevent a repetition of this stupidity called war. I have tried to keep the promise I made to myself, but the progress that the world is making toward peace seems like the crawling of a little child, very halting and slow.
All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
It is a curious thing in human experience, but to live through a period of stress and sorrow with another person, creates a bond which nothing seems able to break.
Franklin's illness...gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons - infinite patience and never ending persistence.
To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.
The very next thing you need to be doing is the thing that terrifies you the most.
... any citizen should be willing to give all that he has to give his country in work or sacrifice in times of crisis.
You do the things that need to be done according to priority.
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
A candle can bring light to a dungeon but it can also be used to light a deadly marijuana cigarette.
First of my own personal requirements is inner calm. This, I think, is an essential. One of the secrets of using your time well is to gain a certain ability to maintain peace within yourself so that much can go on around you and you can stay calm inside.
If you have any interests you can gain a wider audience for those interests while the goldfish bowl is yours!
... the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard?
I think that in great crises you need to have deep rooted convictions and I have a feeling from the kind of campaigns that I have watched Mr. Nixon in in the past that his convictions are not very strong.
those who attack always do so with greater fervor than those who defend.
I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing is very permanent.
Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word. ... We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.
Change means the unknown.
I'm enormously interested in freedom and retaining the right to have whatever economy we want and to shape it as we want and a having sufficient Democracy so that the people actually hold their Government in their own hands.
In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.
I could never say in the morning, "I have a headache and cannot do thus and so". Headache or no headache, thus and so had to be done.
I believe that it is a great mistake not to stand up for people, even when you differ with them, if you feel that they are trying to do things that will help our country.
Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.
A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.
Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it.
No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.
At any age it does us no harm to look over our past shortcomings and plan to improve our characters and actions in the coming year.
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
I have often thought that less is expected of the president of a great corporation than of an American wife.
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.
Nobody else is going to do the things which are yours to be done in the world.
Caring comes from being able to put yourself in the position of the other person.
