Roosevelt Eleanor Quotes

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.

A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

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

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

You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

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.

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart

But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.

No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.

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.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

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

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.

What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Once I 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.

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

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

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.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

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.

A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.

I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do ...

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.

Light a candle instead of cursing the darkness.

It's your life-but only if you make it so.

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

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Do something that scares you everyday.

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.

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.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

Today is the oldest you've ever been, and the youngest you'll ever be again.

The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

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 his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

All of life is a constant education.

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?

Courage is exhilarating.

There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

Every time you meet a situation you think at the time 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.

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

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.

We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it as not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

The bible says no man can take your joy. That means no person can make you live with a negative attitude. No circumstance, no adversity can force you to live in despair. As Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of wheelchair-bound President Franklin D. Roosevelt, often said, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

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

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

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

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.

Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying any attention to you. It's your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you'll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there's no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.

You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you've become yourself.

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

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual you have an obligation to be one.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s determination to rise above her personal pain gave the world one of its great leaders.

Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

There are no have-to's, just choices

Never be bored, and you will never be boring.

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.

Be confident, not certain

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

You always admire what you really don't understand.

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

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

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

What you don't do can be a destructive force.

If you can develop this ability to see what you look at, to understand its meaning, to readjust your knowledge to this new information, you can continue to learn and to grow as long as you live and you’ll have a wonderful time doing it.

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person's stature is as large as one's own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

It wasn’t always that way for the wives of powerful men. Prior to the 1960s, the press generally kept mum about the sex lives of politicians. When Eleanor Roosevelt discovered her husband’s affair by reading a love letter, she kept it to herself — and used it to gain the upper hand in her marriage, which had the additional benefit of setting her free to pursue writing and social activism.

I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Understanding is a two-way street.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

If you lose money you lose much, If you lose friends you lose more, If you lose faith you lose all.

Great Minds Discuss Ideas. Average Minds Discuss Events. Small Minds Discuss People

Each of us has... all the time there is. Those years, weeks, hours, are the sands in the glass running swiftly away. To let them drift through our fingers is tragic waste. To use them to the hilt, making them count for something, is the beginning of wisdom.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most... Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one's own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

FDR Unmasked is first to present convincing evidence of Roosevelt’s battle with prostate cancer, underpinned by FBI memoranda and reliable firsthand information from multiple physicians - even a shocking admission by Eleanor Roosevelt to actress Veronica Lake that her husband was being treated for the disease.

To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times — The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.

There is nothing to fear except fear it's self.

If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say- the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.

Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.

Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge

Do one thing everyday that scares you.

Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one's world.

No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.

THE GREATEST GIFT YOU CAN GIVE A CHILD IS AN IMAGINATION

Great minds talk about ideas; small minds talk about people

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, It can't be done.

I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived.

Mozart, who was buried in a pauper’s grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.

Do whatever comes your way to do as well as you can. Think as little as possible about yourself. Think as much as possible about other people. Dwell on things that are interesting. Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.

The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans.

When it's better for everyone, it's better for everyone.

Obedience may have its uses, but it is no substitute for willing, uncoerced co-operation.

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

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.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life,and be without flavor

Women are like tea bags; you never know how strong they are until they’re put in hot water. — ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

A woman is like a tea bag - you can´t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water. -Eleanor Roosevelt

Up to a certain point it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior.

It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life. Towards this end, experiments on living animals in classrooms should be stopped. To encourage cruelty in the name of science can only destroy the finer emotions of affection and sympathy, and breed an unfeeling callousness in the young towards suffering in all living creatures.

If you want a world ruled by law and not by force you must build up, from the very grassroots, a respect for law.

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.

...so much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty, and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating and destructive effect upon society than the others.

Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can only grow as long as we are interested.

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.

Success in marriage depends on being able, when you get over being in love, to really love.

I wish with all my heart that every child could be so imbued with a sense of the adventure of life that each change, each readjustment, each surprise--good or bad--that came along would be welcomed as part of the whole enthralling experience.

Because high school only comes around once, and I would hate to look back and think I didn’t make the most of every moment because I was scared of what other people thought. Other people never think that much about you anyway. Eleanor Roosevelt said that.

Only I can let you disrepect me! Eleanore Roosevelt

A day out-of- doors, someone I loved to talk with, a good book and some simple food and music — that would be rest. - Eleanor Roosevelt

Get ahead of whom? There is no one I want to shove past. I just want to get ahead of myself, make myself as big as I can, but not measure myself by someone else.

Perhaps we have to learn that life was not meant to be lived in security but with adventurous courage

And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it. All anyone can do is to point out ways and means which have been helpful to others. Perhaps they will serve as suggestions to stimulate your own thinking until you know what it is that will fulfill you, will help you to find out what you want to do with your life.

I wonder,” wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, “whether we have decided to hide behind neutrality? It is safe, perhaps, but I am not always sure it is right to be safe. . . . Every time a nation which has known freedom loses it, other free nations lose something, too.

...no matter how avid they themselves may be for praise and appreciation, people are often niggardly in giving it to others, however merited it is.

Cease to be a drudge. Seek to be an artist.

When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense.

We do not have to become heroes overnight,” Eleanor once wrote. “Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

A great deal of fear is a result of just “not knowing.” We do not know what is involved in a new situation. We do not know whether we can deal with it. The sooner we learn what it entails, the sooner we can dissolve our fear.

We gain courage and wisdom from every instance in which we stop to look fear in the face.

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.

Behind tranquillity lies conquered unhappiness.

Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time 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 ever were before. . . . 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.

Meeting smaller emergencies and learning to deal with them had given me the confidence to deal with this larger emergency. So, little by little, I found out how to do things. After each catastrophe you don’t worry so much the next time, and each time you emerge stronger from your victory.

Effort: You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent

...our children must learn...to face full responsibility for their actions, to make their own choices and cope with the results...the whole democratic system...depends upon it. For our system is founded on self-government, which is untenable if the individuals who make up the system are unable to govern themselves.

Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, “It can’t be done.

What has happened to us in this country? If we study our own history, we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunate from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousand fold by what they have brought us.

I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you.

Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility. —Eleanor Roosevelt

I regretted what a serious teenager I'd been: There were no posters of pop stars or favorite movies, no girlish collection of photos or corsages. Instead there were paintings of sailboats, proper pastel pastorals, a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt. The latter was particularly strange, since I'd known little about Mrs. Roosevelt, except that she was good, which at the time I suppose was enough. Given my druthers now, I'd prefer a snapshot of Warren Harding's wife, "the Duchess," who recorded the smallest offenses in a little red notebook and avenged herself accordingly. Today I like my first ladies with a little bite.

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission. ~Eleanor Roosevelt

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

They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. They will gravitate as automatically as the needle to the north. Somehow, it is unnecessary, in any cold-blooded sense, to sit down and put your head in your hands and plan them. All you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there’s one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

Do one thing every day that frightens you,” Princess Mia advised her audience. “And never think that you can’t make a difference. Even if you’re only sixteen, and everyone is telling you that you’re just a silly teenage girl—don’t let them push you away. Remember one other thing Eleanor Roosevelt said: ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’ You are capable of great things—never let anyone try to tell you that just because you’ve only been a princess for twelve days, you don’t know what you’re doing.

It’s your life—but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickock—1933: I miss you greatly dear. The nicest time of the day is when I write to you. You have a stormier time than I do but I miss you as much, I think.… Please keep most of your heart in Washington as long as I’m here for most of mine is with you!

America is not a pile of goods, more luxury, more comforts, a better telephone system, a greater number of cars. America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average man and, if we can not obtain it, all our other achievements amount to nothing.

Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.

If many of our young people have lost the excitement of the early settlers, who had a country to explore and develop, it is because no one remembers to tell them that the world has never been so challenging, so exciting... Perhaps the older generation is often to blame with its cautious warning: “Take a job that will give you security, not adventure.” But I say to the young: “Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, and imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.

Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply to be what is generally called “a success.

Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you. It’s your attention to yourself that is so stultifying.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own.... Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

No matter what you do , some people will criticize you , and if you are entirely sure that you would not be ashamed to explain your action to someone you loved and who loved you , and you are satisfied in your own mind that you are doing right , then you need not worry about criticism nor need you ever explain what you do .

I think everyone, at some time in his life, has this happen to him, comes face to face with the bitter realization that he has failed in something that means a tremendous amount and probably in a relation that is close to him. Life teaches you that you cannot attain real maturity until you are ready to accept this harsh knowledge, this limitation in yourself, and make the difficult adjustment. Either you must learn to allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it; or somehow you must make yourself learn to meet it. If you refuse to accept the limitation in yourself, you will be unable to grow beyond this point.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democracy.

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion.

For as much as Hillary Clinton might hate admitting this about Monica Lewinisky, Eleanor Roosevelt about Missy Le Hand, Queen Alexandra about Lillie Langtry, Lady Nelson about Emma Hamilton, or Jackie about Marilyn, the reality is that despite their intrinsic animosity toward each other, on a a deep level, the wife and the mistress generally have far more in common than they might care to admit and could, had fate dealt them different cards, even been true friends.

I’m often asked how I take the criticism directed my way. I have three answers: First, if you choose to be in public life, remember Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and grow skin as thick as a rhinoceros. Second, learn to take criticism seriously but not personally. Your critics can actually teach you lessons your friends can’t or won’t. I try to sort out the motivation for criticism, whether partisan, ideological, commercial, or sexist, analyze it to see what I might learn from it, and discard the rest. Third, there is a persistent double standard applied to women in politics - regarding clothes, body types, and of course hairstyles - that you can’t let derail you. Smile and keep going.

A woman is like a tea bag—you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.” —Eleanor Roosevelt “Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can … across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.” —Cheryl Strayed

This book is written from a changing town in Virginia, but this class of mine, these people--the ones who smell like an ashtray in the checkout line, devour a carton of Little Debbies at a sitting, and praise Jesus for a truck with no spare tire--exist in every state in our nation. Maybe the next time we on the left encounter such seemingly self-screwing, stubborn, God-obsessed folks, we can be open to their trials, understand the complexity of their situation, even have enough solidarity to pop for a cheap retread tire out of our own pockets, simply because that would be the kind thing to do and surely would make the ghosts of Joe Hill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mohandas Gandhi smile.

Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?