“Someone sent me a most amusing present of a goldfish bowl. I doubt if anyone living in the White House needs such a reminder… So, if I may offer a thought in consolation to others who for a time have to live in a goldfish bowl, it is: ‘Don’t worry because people know all that you do, for the really important things about anyone are what they are and what they think and feel, and the more you live in a “goldfish bowl” the less people really know about you!’”

(My Day, 7 January 1936)

“If you care for your own children, you must take an interest in all, for your children must go on living in the world made by all children.”

—ER to the Southern Women’s Democratic Union, New York; in the New York Times, 26 February 1933

“Peace time can be as exhilarating to the daredevil as wartime. There is nothing so exciting as creating a new social order.”

—ER in the New York Times, 29 December 1933

“I think we had better begin to decide whether we wish to preserve our civilization or whether we think it of so little use that we might as well let it go. That is what war amounts to.”

—ER, “Ways of Peace,” 1936

“How men hate women in a position of real power!”

—ER to Lorena Hickok, concerning Frances Perkins, 1937

“What a nuisance hearts are, and yet without them life would hardly be worth while!”

—ER to Lorena Hickok, 20 February 1935

“How I hate doing these things and then they say someday I’ll run for an office. Well, I’d have to be chloroformed first! [But if it improves these terrible] conditions even a little bit I suppose it is worth it….”

—ER to Lorena Hickok, February 1935

“I think the day of selfishness is over; the day of really working together has come, and we must learn to work together all of us, regardless of race or creed or color…. We go ahead together or we go down together….

—ER, 11 May 1934 Washington Conference on Negro Education

“Don’t dry up by inaction but go out and do things…. Don’t believe what somebody else tells you, but know things by your own contacts with life. If you do that you will be of great value to the community and the world.”

—ER to Todhunter graduates, 3 June 1938