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 should be curiosity.
When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
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.
Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.
I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.
What one has to do usually can be done.
With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.
Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.
It is not more vacation we need - it is more vocation.
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.
Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.
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.
I do not think that I am a natural born mother... If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.
The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours - and I think probably gave me many nightmares.
What you don't do can be a destructive force.
I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.