No Ordinary Time Quotes

“We do not have to become heroes overnight,” Eleanor once wrote. “Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“In Louisiana, a group of nine Negro GIs boarded a train for transfer from the hospital at Camp Claiborne to the hospital at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. The train was delayed for twelve hours. “The only place that would serve us was the lunch room at the station,” one of the nine reported. “But we couldn’t eat where the white people were eating. To do that would contaminate the very air of the place, so we had to go to the kitchen. That was bad enough but that’s not all. About 11:30 that same morning, about two dozen German prisoners of war came to the lunchroom with two guards. They entered the large room, sat at the table. Then meals were served them. They smoked and had a swell time. As we stood on the outside and saw what was going on, we could scarcely believe our own eyes. There they sat: eating, talking, laughing, smoking. They were enemies of our country, people sworn to destroy all the so-called democratic governments of the world . . . . What are we fighting for?”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“Red tape must not be used to trip up little children on their way to safety.” Since visitor visas were not subject to numerical limitations, the change Eleanor advocated promised to open America’s doors to tens of thousands of refugees, and simultaneously to provide an invaluable precedent for saving countless lives in the years ahead.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“By the summer of 1933, Eleanor's melancholy had passed. 'The times of depression are often felt as gaps,' a psychologist has written, 'temporary losses of certainty or identity which leave us feeling empty.' Seen in this light, Eleanor's despondency was the intervening period of chaos between the breakup of her old identity as teacher and political activist in New York State and the establishment of a new identity in the White House.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“showed by his appetite his appreciation of Molotov’s magnificent refreshments. Relaxed and fortified, he returned to his car and proceeded to recite Byron’s “Childe Harold” to Sarah for the remainder of the journey to Yalta.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“Novelist Saul Bellow remembers the exhilarating experience of listening to Roosevelt speak. “I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway on a summer evening. The light held after nine o’clock, and the ground was covered with clover, more than a mile of green between Cottage Grove and Stony Island. The blight hadn’t yet carried off the elms, and under them drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“At the airfield, the photographers begged for a shot. “You simply cannot do this to me,” he laughingly remarked, and they obliged, lowering their cameras. As the president’s plane took off, Churchill put his hand on American Vice-Consul Kenneth Pendar’s arm. “If anything happened to that man,” he said, “I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“was ready to be moved. While Roosevelt backed the draft, Eleanor continued to argue for a wider form of national service available to both men and women through an expanded National Youth Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. “To tie it up with military training alone,” she wrote in her column in midsummer, “[is to miss] the point of the situation we face today. Democracy requires service from each and every one of us.” In Eleanor’s view, real national defense meant the mobilization of the country as a whole, so that every individual could receive training to help end poverty and make the community a better place in which to live.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“Eleanor had been unable to share in her husband’s optimism; she had worried constantly about what America would look like after the fighting stopped, whether the liberal and humane values which had animated the New Deal were being sacrificed to the necessities of war. But in the fall of 1945, as she began traveling around the country again, she realized that the nation had taken even greater strides toward social justice during the war than it had during the New Deal. Indeed, the Roosevelt years had witnessed the most profound social revolution in the country since the Civil War—nothing less than the creation of modern America.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“If ever there was a country unprepared for the war, it was the U.S. in 1940. And yet now, only four years later, the United States was clearly the most productive, most powerful country on the face of the earth.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“If I wasn't busy," she replied, "I'd go crazy.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“The domestic scene,” she admitted, referring not only to the coal dispute but to a rash of racial disturbances that had recently broken out, “is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“Spring had come to Washington. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. Yet the glacial mood of the capital refused to melt. Accusations”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“The habit of mobility had become ingrained.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“FDR, even weakened and near the end of his life, opted to allow disabled veterans to see his true condition. This allowed them to understand the life which could still be before them.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“When white workers heard about the Sojourner Truth project, they demanded the units for themselves and enlisted the support of white residents in the neighborhood where the development was being built. Rudolph Tenerowicz, Detroit’s congressman, carried the ball in Washington, successfully prevailing upon the members of the Conference Committee, consisting mostly of Southerners, to add a clause to the FWA’s $300,000 appropriations bill specifying that “no money would be released unless the ‘nigger lover’ [Clark Foreman] was fired and the project converted to white occupancy.” The FWA capitulated quickly and dishonorably. That same day, the Detroit housing committee was ordered to redirect its recruitment of prospective tenants from black to white. Minutes later, Clark Foreman “resigned.” Civil-rights leaders reacted with rage. Their first impulse was to contact Eleanor. “Surely you would not stand by and see the Sojourner Truth defense homes that were built for Negroes be taken away from us,” Mrs. Charles Diggs wrote from Detroit. Calmly and directly, Eleanor approached the president, emphasizing that both blacks and whites, including Edward Jeffries, Detroit’s mayor, and leaders of the UAW, were firmly committed to the position that the blacks should have the project.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“The Yearling.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“They made an extraordinary team. She was more earnest, less devious, less patient, less fun, more uncompromisingly moral; he possessed the more trustworthy political talent, the more finely tuned sense of timing, the better feel for the citizenry, the smarter understanding of how to get things done. She could travel the country when he could not; she could speak her mind without the constraints of public office. She was the agitator; he was the politician. But they were linked by indissoluble bonds and they drew strength from each other.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“Eleanor Roosevelt's stand on civil rights, her insistence that America could not fight racism abroad while tolerating it at home, remains one of the affirming moments in the history of the home front during the war.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“No first lady before had ever become such a public figure. Her breadth of activities created new expectations against which her successors would be measured.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“As demobilization loomed on the horizon, the image of women as comrades-in-arms was replaced by the image of women as competitors for men. And with this shift came a shift in public opinion. Enthusiastic admiration for Rosie the Riveter was replaced by the prevailing idea that 'Women ought to be delighted to give up any job and return to their proper sphere - the kitchen.' All of a sudden, in every medium of popular culture, women were barraged with propaganda and the value of domesticity . . . Ignoring poll after poll that suggested that the majority of women wanted to continue working, the women's magazines focused almost exclusively on those women who were ready to quit.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“In times of crisis, presidential scholar Grant McConnell has written, the nation, which seemed only an abstraction the day before, suddenly becomes a vivid reality. A mysterious process unfolds as the president and the flag become rallying points for all Americans. At such moments, if the president is able to meet the challenge, he is able to give shape, to organize, to create and recreate the nation.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

“Because of the greatest—indeed, the only—redistribution of income downward in the nation’s history, a middle-class country had emerged.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“So dependent on her had the homesteaders become that when their school bus”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“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

“Because of the greatest—indeed, the only—redistribution of income downward in the nation’s history, a middle-class country had emerged. Half of the American people—those at the lower end of the compensation scale—had doubled their income, while those in the top 20 percent had risen by little more than 50 percent. Those in the bottom half of earners had seen their share of the country’s income increase by 16 percent, while those at the top had lost 6 percent. As a result, social historian Geoffrey Perrett observed, “barriers to social and economic equality which had stood for decades were either much reduced or entirely overthrown.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II

“In Eleanor’s judgment, her husband was better able to meet the tension than many of the others, “because he’d learned from polio that if there was nothing you could do about a situation, then you’d better try to put it out of your mind and go on with your work at hand.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II