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Quotes by First-lady
"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."
44
"It's my feeling that God lends you your children until they're about eighteen years old. If you haven't made your points with them by then, it's too late."
44
"It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people's business."
43
"It seems to me I spent my life in car pools, but you know, that's how I kept track of what was going on."
43
"Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President's widow?"
43
"I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe."
43
"Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it. At seventy I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that 'this too shall pass!'"
43
"What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren't supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown - watch the raindrops coming down the window pane?"
43
"I would never do anything to undermine my husband's point of view."
43
"My makeup wasn't smeared, I wasn't disheveled, I behaved politely, and I never finished off a bottle, so how could I be alcoholic?"
42
"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
42
"It's always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they're about eighteen years old. If you haven't made your points with them by then, it's too late."
42
"We always get up about 5:30, and George gets up and goes in and gets the coffee and brings it to me, and that's been our ritual since we got married. And we read the newspapers in bed and drink coffee for about an hour probably, read our briefing papers."
42
"I'm no different from anybody else. If I don't have a card, I can't check out these books."
42
"I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition."
42
"Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide."
42
"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."
42
"Life has got to be lived-that's all that there is to it."
42
"Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it."
41
"We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them."
41
"Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open."
41
"All of life is a constant education."
41
"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. If you can live through that, you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face."
41
"Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression."
41
"I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time."
40
"I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances."
40
"Well, Warren Harding, I have got you the presidency. What are you going to do with it?"
40
"There are two kinds of women, those who want power in the world and those who want power in bed."
40
"Being a reporter seems a ticket out to the world."
40
"I'm not a competitive person, and I think women like me because they don't think I'm competitive, just nice."
40
"The search for human freedom can never be complete without freedom for women."
40
"I'll be a wife and mother first, then First Lady."
40
"When you have decided what you believe what you feel must be done have the courage to stand alone and be counted."
40
"We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot."
40
"If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively."
40
"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."
40
"If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much."
39
"Though my plans at the moment are vague, I can assure you that I'll never run for the Senate in New York."
39
"I think togetherness is a very important ingredient to family life."
39
"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."
39
"Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues."
39
"The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse."
39
"My evil genius Procrastination has whispered me to tarry 'til a more convenient season."
39
"Sex is a bad thing because it rumples the clothes."
39
"I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.'"
38
"I'm not the one who was elected. I would never do anything to undermine my husband's point of view."
38
"I deplore any action which denies artistic talent an opportunity to express itself because of prejudice against race origin."
38
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