The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt

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, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.”

There is so much to do, so many engrossing challenges, so many heartbreaking and pressing needs, so much in every day that is profoundly interesting.

would like to say, however, that I do not feel that we, as individuals or as a nation, gain either in dignity or in prestige by refusing to know the people who lead the great opposition to our way of life, by refusing to deal with them in friendship or at least with good manners when possible, or by refusing to learn to understand them as far as we can.

“YOU REALLY must slow down.” This is becoming the repeated refrain of my children and all of my friends. But how can I when the world is so challenging in its problems and so terribly interesting?

am still taken aback to discover how closely one’s most trivial movements are followed in this day of television. It seems as though one can find privacy only within the silence of one’s own mind.

can always do something if we care enough.

There is such a big, muddled world, so much to be done, so much that can be done if we increase in depth of understanding, in learning to care, in thinking of hunger not as an abstraction but as one empty stomach, in having a hospitable mind, open like a window to currents of air and to light from all sides.

The refugees of the world are a constant and painful reminder of the breakdown of civilization through the stupidity of war. They are its permanent victims.

when I believe, after weighing the evidence, that what I am doing is right I go ahead and try as hard as I can

while I weigh as honestly as I can their grounds for disapproval, when I feel that I am right in what I do, it seems to me that I cannot afford, as a self-respecting individual, to refuse to do a thing merely because it will make me disliked or bring down a storm of criticism on my head.