Eleanor Roosevelt

“There is an old proverb: “L’appetit vient en mangeant.” Translated into English I suppose the nearest we have is : ” The more you have, the more you want.” As we look over the world today, it looks to me as though human nature is living up to this proverb. The more we kill, the more casual we become about human life. We read our papers with a kind of detachment which I believe lies at the root of the continuance of many of the horrors of civilization. Planes flying over some place in Africa and killing many people seem to make no dent on our imagination. That some men in a different country assassinate certain officials of their government reads to the majority of us like a fairy tale. That a group of gangsters in our own country commit some terrible crime brings a little more interest, but not enough to galvanize any of us into real action. I suppose this apathy comes partly from the fact that we always feel that these things will happen to the other fellow but not to us, and as individuals we feel that our action or inaction will produce about the same result-nobody in authority will pay attention to what we think ! Until we free ourselves of this inferiority complex, which is nothing more than a comfortable alibi to sidestep responsibility, I do not see much more chance of improving conditions either at home or abroad. And yet the most powerful weapon that we have at our command today is public opinion. Statements quail before it and it could move mountains!”

—	Eleanor Roosevelt in My Day, February 28 1936