Eleanor Roosevelt
First Lady, diplomat and human rights advocate, 1884–1962. Explained quotes and 2 wrongly credited to them.
A line from a 1997 newspaper column written as an imaginary commencement speech. The column became the hit song “Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” and its lines were credited to famous people.
See who really said it →An empowering line credited to Eleanor Roosevelt during her lifetime. It has never been found in her columns, books or speeches, so its true origin is unknown.
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About Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt was the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and redefined the role of First Lady, holding her own press conferences, writing a daily newspaper column and campaigning for civil rights and the poor. After her husband’s death she served as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations and chaired the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948.
She wrote thousands of columns and several books, and she is one of the people most often credited with inspirational quotes she did not write. Her “My Day” columns, now digitized, are the best place to check what she actually said.
More lines by Roosevelt
Short quotes checked against their sources.
- “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.”Remarks at the United Nations, 1958