
“No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Attributed quotes
Disputed
Variant: No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Source: Sometimes claimed to appear in her book This is My Story, but in The Quote Verifier by Ralph Keyes (2006), Keyes writes on p. 97 that "Bartlett's and other sources say her famous quotation can be found in This is My Story, Roosevelt's 1937 autobiography. It can't. Quotographer Rosalie Maggio scoured that book and many others by and about Roosevelt in search of this line, without success. In their own extensive searching, archivists at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, have not been able to find the quotation in This Is My Story or any other writing by the First Lady. A discussion of some of the earliest known attributions of this quote to Roosevelt, which may be a paraphrase from an interview, can be found in this entry from Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/03/30/not-inferior/.
“No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Attributed quotes
“One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”
Source: Address to the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf at Mt. Airy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (8 July 1896) http://www.afb.org/mylife/book.asp?ch=P3Ch4, quoted in supplement to The Story of My Life
Conclusion
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Context: A conquest of this kind is never finished; the contingency remains, and, so that he may assert his will, man is even obliged to stir up in the world the outrage he does not want. But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.
“I can be forced to live without happiness,
But I will never consent to live without honor.”
L’on peut me réduire à vivre sans bonheur,
Mais non pas me résoudre à vivre sans honneur.
Don Gomès, act II, scene i.
Le Cid (1636)