Free-thinking 1st ladies

Isn't it great to have a pair of free-thinkers in the White House again? Thinkers period?

As I grew older I questioned a great many of the things that I knew very well my grandmother who had brought me up had taken for granted. And I think I might have been a quite difficult person to live with if it hadn’t been for the fact that my husband once said it didn’t do you any harm to learn those things, so why not let your children learn them? When they grow up they’ll think things out for themselves.

And that gave me a feeling that perhaps that’s what we all must do—think out for ourselves what we could believe and how we could live by it. And so I came to the conclusion that you had to use this life to develop the very best that you could develop.

I don’t know whether I believe in a future life....

A future life elsewhere, post mortem, and as herself, I think Mrs. Roosevelt meant. (I like what Andrew Carnegie said about this too, btw: it's not our place to worry about a future life, but to "pitch this one as high as we can.")

But she did believe in our collective future. That's a form of faith, too. I prefer to call it hope.