Isabelle Cook

“They address the questions that are proper to us, not as this or that kind of specialist, this or that kind of professional, but as individuals as such—the very questions we are apt to ask when we look up from our work and think about our lives. Questions of love, death, family, morality, time, truth, God, and everything else within the wide, starred universe of human experience.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“In the very desire for help one is apt to forget that the objective should be to enable the individual to stand on his own feet.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

“Roosevelt “believed that with enough energy and spirit anything could be achieved by man,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote in an essay comparing Roosevelt and Churchill. “So passionate a faith in the future,” Berlin went on, “implies an exceptionally sensitive awareness, conscious or self-conscious, of the tendencies of one’s milieu, of the desires, hopes, fears, loves, hatreds, of the human beings who compose it, of what are described as ‘trends.’” This uncanny awareness, Berlin argued, was the source of Roosevelt’s genius. It was almost as if the “inner currents [and] tremors” of human society were registering themselves within his nervous system, “with a kind of seismographical accuracy.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“I think there is more opportunity now than ever before for women in politics if they will keep their ideals high and go in with the purpose of being of service rather than with the purpose of obtaining an office.”
― Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers