Quotes by First Ladies - Page 2

If you bungle raising your children I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.
Martha Washington
Happiness is not a goal it is a byproduct.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: "A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work and the ability to love others."
Eleanor Roosevelt
Life has got to be lived-that's all that there is to it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Whether you are talking about education career or service you are talking about life. And life must really have joy. It's supposed to be fun.
Barbara Bush
When you cease to make a contribution you begin to die.
Eleanor Roosevelt
If we want a free and peaceful world if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being-we can do it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Someday someone will follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. And I wish him well.
Barbara Bush
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
My evil genius Procrastination has whispered me to tarry 'til a more convenient season.
Mary Todd Lincoln
We have too many sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams
For 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.
Eleanor Roosevelt
What you don't do can be a destructive force.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I think togetherness is a very important ingredient to family life. It's a cliche and we use it too much but I think for a husband and wife the way to stay close is to do things together and share.
Barbara Bush
The darn trouble with cleaning the house is it gets dirty the next day anyway so skip a week if you have to. The children are the most important thing.
Barbara Bush
I am convinced the longer I live that life and its blessings are not so entirely unjustly distributed as when we are suffering greatly we are inclined to suppose.
Mary Todd Lincoln
To us family means putting your arms around each other and being there.
Barbara Bush
Do not be afraid of mistakes providing you do not make the same one twice.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Change means the unknown.
Eleanor Roosevelt
What one has to do usually can be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.
Lady Bird Johnson
One of the things my life has taught me is how important it is to try to say "I love you" in ways that can be preserved looked at and read when you are alone or when there is adversity or when circumstances bring separation. In any case . . . saying "I love you" is one of the "secrets" of the happy marriage that Ronnie and I have shared. Ronnie's letters move me to this day. They are his gift to me across the years and throughout the decades of love.
Nancy Reagan
I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up.
Barbara Bush
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. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never for whatever reason turn his back on life.
Eleanor Roosevelt
When you have decided what you believe what you feel must be done have the courage to stand alone and be counted.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Steady as a clock busy as a bee and cheerful as a cricket.
Martha Washington
Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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!'
Eleanor Roosevelt
A woman is like a tea bag: you never know her strength until you drop her in hot water.
Nancy Reagan
The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.
Abigail Adams
It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. ... Great necessities call out great virtues.
Abigail Adams
I think my biggest achievement is that after going through a rather difficult time I consider myself comparatively sane. I'm proud of that.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Every time you meet a situation though you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the torture of the damned once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.
Eleanor Roosevelt
What one has to do usually can be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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
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
Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist.
Eleanor Roosevelt
From her character in the HBO miniseries: "The art of politics is the art of applying the seat of the britches to the seat of the chair.
Abigail Adams
Where flowers bloom so does hope.
Lady Bird Johnson
Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
Claudia Alta Johnson
I turned to books for comfort. (Former First Lady, Laura Bush)
Laura Bush
...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.
Eleanor Roosevelt
If we lost everything except for the clothes we stood up in, would we turn to each other and think....How lucky we really were?
Jacqueline Kennedy
It is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?
Eleanor Roosevelt
I did NOT have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty.
Imelda Marcos
...no one can afford not to be a man. No position can compensate for coming face to face with a robot when you are alone.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one's world.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
Eleanor Roosevelt
It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.
Abigail Adams
...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.
Eleanor Roosevelt
...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.
Eleanor Roosevelt