quotes.txt

I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. ~ Bella Abzug
They used to give us a day--it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are. ~ Bella Abzug
Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over. ~ Bella Abzug
The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes. ~ Bella Abzug
Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel. ~ Bella Abzug
We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it. ~ Bella Abzug
I am not elevating women to sainthood, nor am I suggesting that all women share the same views, or that all women are good and all men bad. ~ Bella Abzug
Women have been and are prejudiced, narrowminded, reactionary, even violent. ~ Bella Abzug
If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century -- and the economy -- around. ~ Bella Abzug
Abortion doesn't belong in the political arena. It's a private right, like many other rights concerning the family. ~ Bella Abzug
I prefer the word "homemaker" because "housewife" always implies that there may be a wife someplace else. ~ Bella Abzug
I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee. ~ Bella Abzug
The establishment is made up of little men, very frightened. ~ Bella Abzug
All of the men on my staff can type. ~ Bella Abzug
I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business. ~ Bella Abzug
The inside operation of Congress -- the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building -- is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it. ~ Bella Abzug
Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. ~ Abigail Adams
Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. ~ Abigail Adams
If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. ~ Abigail Adams
If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women. ~ Abigail Adams
Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since. ~ Abigail Adams
Great necessities call out great virtues. ~ Abigail Adams
I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic. ~ Abigail Adams
Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex. ~ Abigail Adams
The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex, was to be found in the families of the educated class and in occasional intercourse with the learned. (1817) ~ Abigail Adams
I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of the females of my own country. ~ Abigail Adams
The natural tenderness and delicacy of our constitution, added to the many dangers we are subject to from your sex, renders it almost impossible for a single lady to travel without injury to her character. And those who have a protector in a husband have, generally speaking, obstacles to prevent their roving. ~ Abigail Adams
If much depends as is allowed upon the early Education of youth and the first principles which are instill'd take the deepest root, great benefit must arise from literary accomplishments in women. ~ Abigail Adams
These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. ~ Abigail Adams
To be good, and do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words. ~ Abigail Adams
Learning is not to be attained by chance, it must be sought with ardor and attended to with diligence. ~ Abigail Adams
But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act. ~ Abigail Adams
A little of what you call frippery is very necessary towards looking like the rest of the world. ~ Abigail Adams
We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them. ~ Abigail Adams
I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe. ~ Abigail Adams
Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. ~ Abigail Adams
These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. ~ Abigail Adams
No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches. ~ Abigail Adams
Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world. ~ Jane Addams
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. ~ Jane Addams
Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation. ~ Jane Addams
In his own way each man must struggle, lest the normal law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life. ~ Jane Addams
Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics. ~ Jane Addams
Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt. ~ Jane Addams
Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited. ~ Jane Addams
We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or class; but we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having. ~ Jane Addams
Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself. ~ Jane Addams
The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress. ~ Jane Addams
Civilization is a method of living and an attitude of equal respect for all people. ~ Jane Addams
Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled. ~ Jane Addams
I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance. ~ Jane Addams
National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events. ~ Jane Addams
An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply low rental. ~ Jane Addams
America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live. ~ Jane Addams
The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself. ~ Jane Addams
The excellent becomes the permanent. ~ Jane Addams
Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. ~ Louisa May Alcott
Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy. ~ Louisa May Alcott
Help one another is part of the religion of our sisterhood. ~ Louisa May Alcott
Many argue; not many converse. ~ Louisa May Alcott
Resolve to take fate by the throat and shake a living out of her. ~ Louisa May Alcott
I believe that it is as much a right and duty for women to do something with their lives as for men and we are not going to be satisfied with such frivolous parts as you give us. ~ Louisa May Alcott
"Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary. ~ Louisa May Alcott
I asked for bread, and I got a stone in the shape of a pedestal. ~ Louisa May Alcott
Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents. ~ Louisa May Alcott
It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women. ~ Louisa May Alcott
I put in my list all the busy, useful independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us. ~ Louisa May Alcott
Housekeeping ain't no joke! ~ Louisa May Alcott
I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it. ~ Louisa May Alcott
I like to help women help themselves, as that is, in my opinion, the best way to settle the woman question.  Whatever we can do and do well we have a right to, and I don't think any one will deny us. ~ Louisa May Alcott
People don't have fortunes left them -- nowadays; men have to work, and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.... ~ Louisa May Alcott
Now we are expected to be as wise as men who have had generations of all the help there is, and we scarcely anything. ~ Louisa May Alcott
Now I am beginning to live a little and feel less like a sick oyster at low tide. ~ Louisa May Alcott
I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship. ~ Louisa May Alcott
How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak? ~ Isabel Allende
We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent. ~ Isabel Allende
Write what should not be forgotten. ~ Isabel Allende
While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things. Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin. ~ Isabel Allende
Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken. ~ Isabel Allende
For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time. ~ Isabel Allende
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes! ~ Maya Angelou
It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable. ~ Maya Angelou
A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song. ~ Maya Angelou
The needs of society determine its ethics. ~ Maya Angelou
One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest. ~ Maya Angelou
I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition -- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive. ~ Maya Angelou
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver. ~ Maya Angelou
The honorary duty of a human being is to love. ~ Maya Angelou
Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong. ~ Maya Angelou
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. ~ Maya Angelou
Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style. ~ Maya Angelou
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. ~ Maya Angelou
The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry. ~ Maya Angelou
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns all clean. ~ Maya Angelou
Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable. ~ Maya Angelou
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded. ~ Maya Angelou
Alone, all alone ~ Maya Angelou
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders. ~ Maya Angelou
Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure. ~ Maya Angelou
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them. ~ Diane Arbus
There are always two things that happen. One is recognition and the other is that it's totally peculiar. But there's some sense in which I always identify with them. ~ Diane Arbus
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. ~ Diane Arbus
The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way. ~ Diane Arbus
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do -- that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse. ~ Diane Arbus
I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse. ~ Diane Arbus
It's important to take bad pictures. It's the bad ones that have to do with what you've never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn't seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again. ~ Diane Arbus
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. ~ Diane Arbus
There are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them. ~ Diane Arbus
Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. ~ Diane Arbus
I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself. ~ Diane Arbus
One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud. ~ Diane Arbus
My favorite thing is to go where I've never been. ~ Diane Arbus
Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. ~ Diane Arbus
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. ~ Diane Arbus
Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true. ~ Diane Arbus
It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, ''All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.'' And they did. ~ Diane Arbus
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding. ~ Diane Arbus
Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory. ~ Diane Arbus
Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers. ~ Elizabeth Arden
I'm not interested in age.  People who tell me their age are silly.  You're as old as you feel. ~ Elizabeth Arden
There's only one Elizabeth like me and that's the Queen. ~ Elizabeth Arden
I only want people around me who can do the impossible. ~ Elizabeth Arden
Dear, never forget one little point. It's my business. You just work here. ~ Elizabeth Arden
I pick good women, but I haven't had any luck with my men. ~ Elizabeth Arden
Treat a horse like a woman and a woman like a horse. And they'll both win for you. ~ Elizabeth Arden
Nothing that costs only a dollar is not worth having. ~ Elizabeth Arden
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil. ~ Hannah Arendt
To think and to be fully alive are the same. ~ Hannah Arendt
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes. ~ Hannah Arendt
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. ~ Hannah Arendt
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. ~ Hannah Arendt
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easer to act than to think. ~ Hannah Arendt
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. ~ Hannah Arendt
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford. ~ Hannah Arendt
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity. ~ Hannah Arendt
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. ~ Hannah Arendt
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. ~ Hannah Arendt
Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence. ~ Hannah Arendt
Action without a name, a "who" attached to it, is meaningless. ~ Hannah Arendt
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny. ~ Hannah Arendt
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. ~ Hannah Arendt
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces. ~ Hannah Arendt
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance. ~ Hannah Arendt
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. ~ Hannah Arendt
The most practical thing in the world is common sense and common humanity. ~ Nancy Astor
No one sex can govern alone. I believe that one of the reasons why civilization has failed so lamentably is that is had one-sided government. ~ Nancy Astor
We are not asking for superiority for we have always had that; all we ask is equality. ~ Nancy Astor
Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women. ~ Nancy Astor
If you want a party hack, don't elect me. ~ Nancy Astor
I can imagine nothing worse than a man-governed world -- except a woman-governed world. ~ Nancy Astor
In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance, he laid the blame on a woman. ~ Nancy Astor
I married beneath me -- all women do. ~ Nancy Astor
We women talk too much, but even then we don't tell half what we know. ~ Nancy Astor
It is no use blaming the men -- we made them what they are -- and now it is up to us to try and make ourselves -- the makers of men -- a little more responsible. ~ Nancy Astor
Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones. ~ Nancy Astor
Why, I don't even know the difference between a king and a knave. ~ Nancy Astor
One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time. ~ Nancy Astor
My vigor, vitality and cheek repel me -- I am the kind of woman I would run from. ~ Nancy Astor
One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time. ~ Nancy Astor
The only thing I like about rich people is their money. ~ Nancy Astor
The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you. ~ Nancy Astor
A fool without fear is sometimes wiser than an angel with fear. ~ Nancy Astor
The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything... or nothing. ~ Nancy Astor
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent. ~ Nancy Astor
Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity. ~ Nancy Astor
Years ago, I thought old age would be dreadful because I should not be able to do things I would want to do. Now I find there is nothing I want to do after all. ~ Nancy Astor
I used to dread getting older because I thought I would not be able to do all the things I wanted to do, but now that I am older I find that I don't want to do them. ~ Nancy Astor
I refuse to admit that I am more than 52, even if that makes my children illegitimate. ~ Nancy Astor
Take a close-up of a woman past sixty! You might as well use a picture of a relief map of Ireland! ~ Nancy Astor
Jakie, is it my birthday or am I dying? ~ Nancy Astor
I would be a socialist if I thought it would work. ~ Nancy Astor
I am neither a Communist or a Fascist ... I loathe all Dictatorships whether of the Russian or the German type -- They are all equally cruel. ~ Nancy Astor
Politics must not remain a bastion of male dominance, for there is much that women can bring into politics that would make our world a kinder, gentler place for humanity to thrive in. ~ Corazon Aquino
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship. ~ Corazon Aquino
Reconciliation should be accompanied by justice, otherwise it will not last. While we all hope for peace it shouldn't be peace at any cost but peace based on principle, on justice. ~ Corazon Aquino
As I came to power peacefully, so shall I keep it. ~ Corazon Aquino
Freedom of expression - in particular, freedom of the press - guarantees popular participation in the decisions and actions of government, and popular participation is the essence of our democracy. ~ Corazon Aquino
One must be frank to be relevant. ~ Corazon Aquino
It has often been said that Marcos was the first male chauvinist to underestimate me. ~ Corazon Aquino
National leaders who find themselves wilting under the withering criticisms by members of the media, would do well not to take such criticism personally but to regard the media as their allies in keeping the government clean and honest, its services efficient and timely, and its commitment to democracy strong and unwavering. ~ Corazon Aquino
The media's power is frail. Without the people's support, it can be shut off with the ease of turning a light switch. ~ Corazon Aquino
I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life. ~ Corazon Aquino
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. ~ Jane Austen
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. ~ Jane Austen
A woman, especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. ~ Jane Austen
One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty. ~ Jane Austen
If there is anything disagreeable going on men are always sure to get out of it. ~ Jane Austen
What strange creatures brothers are! ~ Jane Austen
A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment. ~ Jane Austen
Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure to be kindly spoken of. ~ Jane Austen
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. ~ Jane Austen
If a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. If she can hesitate as to Yes, she ought to say No, directly. ~ Jane Austen
It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should refuse an offer of marriage. ~ Jane Austen
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation! ~ Jane Austen
Nobody minds having what is too good for them. ~ Jane Austen
A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill. ~ Jane Austen
Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast. ~ Jane Austen
It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others. ~ Jane Austen
Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments. ~ Jane Austen
If any one faculty of our nature may be called ~ Jane Austen
I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me that trouble of liking them. ~ Jane Austen
My concern has always been for the people who are victimized, unable to speak for themselves and who need outside help. ~ Joan Baez
Action is the antidote to despair. ~ Joan Baez
All serious daring starts from within. ~ Joan Baez
I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it? ~ Joan Baez
Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try and give their best qualities to men - bring them softness, teach them how to cry. ~ Joan Baez
It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page. ~ Joan Baez
Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers. ~ Joan Baez
The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organization of violence. ~ Joan Baez
If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how? ~ Joan Baez
Good morning, children of the 80s. This is your Woodstock, and it's long overdue. ~ Joan Baez
As long as one keeps searching, the answers come. ~ Joan Baez
To love means you also trust. ~ Joan Baez
The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one. ~ Joan Baez
Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow. ~ Joan Baez
You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can decide how you're going to live now. ~ Joan Baez
You never find yourself until you face the truth. ~ Pearl Bailey
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you -- if you don't repeat it. ~ Pearl Bailey
When we swallow a little knowledge of ourselves, it becomes either good or sour inside. ~ Pearl Bailey
My kitchen is a mystical place, a kind of temple for me. It is a place where the surfaces seem to have significance, where the sounds and odors carry meaning that transfers from the past and bridges to the future. ~ Pearl Bailey
A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be so hard in the end to lie down and rest. ~ Pearl Bailey
What the world really needs is more love and less paper work. ~ Pearl Bailey
Everybody wants to do something to help, but nobody wants to be the first. ~ Pearl Bailey
A crown, if it hurts us, is not worth wearing. ~ Pearl Bailey
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it. ~ Pearl Bailey
To talk to someone who does not listen is enough to tense the devil. ~ Pearl Bailey
When you're young, the silliest notions seem the greatest achievements. ~ Pearl Bailey
You never find yourself until you face the truth. ~ Pearl Bailey
The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that. ~ Pearl Bailey
People see God every day, they just don't recognize him. ~ Pearl Bailey
Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence. ~ Pearl Bailey
We look into mirrors but we only see the effects of our times on us -- not our effects on others. ~ Pearl Bailey
My whole life is a challenge! ~ Oksana Baiul
It is because I have lived a most difficult life that I could do this. ~ Oksana Baiul
One shouldn't be afraid to lose; this is sport. One day you win; another day you lose. Of course, everyone wants to be the best. This is normal. This is what sport is about. This is why I love it. ~ Oksana Baiul
I like when people are watching. What's the reason for figure skating without spectators watching? ~ Oksana Baiul
Olympic Gold changed me and my life dramatically. I became a celebrity overnight and people see me as a famous skater, not a real person. ~ Oksana Baiul
Competitive skaters must be prepared for lots of work, challenges, self-discipline, and motivation. The desire must be there, but more importantly, your love for the sport. ~ Oksana Baiul
I skate how I feel.  I think it must be a gift from God. ~ Oksana Baiul
I keep my skates. My Olympic skates are still in my closet! ~ Oksana Baiul
I skate now for fun and to keep myself in shape. ~ Oksana Baiul
I don't care what the critics say or think because I care for and love my fans. ~ Oksana Baiul
I took some time off to enjoy my life, but figure skating is something I love and something I will continue doing for the rest of my life. ~ Oksana Baiul
I'd like to consider myself a versatile skater and I like to skate to different kinds of music. ~ Oksana Baiul
When I'm on the ice, I like being Oksana, and not imitate other skater's music. ~ Oksana Baiul
Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
Let's not quibble! I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right." ~ Tallulah Bankhead
There is less in this than meets the eye. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I'm not at my best when I start to moralize or philosophize. Logic is elusive, especially to one who so rarely uses it. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I've been called many things, but never an intellectual. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I'm as pure as the driven slush. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
Acting is a form of confusion. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
Don't be taken in by the guff that critics are killing the theater. Commonly they sin on the side of enthusiasm. Too often they give their blessing to trash. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I think the Republican party should be placed in drydock and have the barnacles scraped off its bottom. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
Here's a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late start without me. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
A frozen daiquiri of a scorching afternoon is soothing. It makes living more tolerable. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
Drink reacts on its practitioners in conflicting ways. One brave can knock off a quart of Scotch and look and act as sober as Herbert Hoover. Another, after three Martinis, makes two-cushion carroms off the chaise longue as he attempts to negotiate the bathroom. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine. ~ Tallulah Bankhead
Cocaine isn't habit-forming. I should know -- I've been using it for years ~ Tallulah Bankhead
An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness. ~ Clara Barton
I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them. ~ Clara Barton
The conflict is one thing I've been waiting for.  I'm well and strong and young -- young enough to go to the front.  If I cannot be a soldier, I'll help soldiers. ~ Clara Barton
What could I do but go with them [soldiers of the Civil War], or work for them and my country? The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins. ~ Clara Barton
A ball had passed between my body and the right arm which supported him, cutting through the sleeve and passing through his chest from shoulder to shoulder. There was no more to be done for him and I left him to his rest. I have never mended that hole in my sleeve. I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat? ~ Clara Barton
I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay. ~ Clara Barton
[T]he door that nobody else will go in at, seems always to swing open widely for me. ~ Clara Barton
Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business. ~ Clara Barton
The surest test of discipline is its absence. ~ Clara Barton
It is wise statesmanship which suggests that in time of peace we must prepare for war, and it is no less a wise benevolence that makes preparation in the hour of peace for assuaging the ills that are sure to accompany war. ~ Clara Barton
Economy, prudence, and a simple life are the sure masters of need, and will often accomplish that which, their opposites, with a fortune at hand, will fail to do. ~ Clara Barton
I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things always have been done .... I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind. I go for anything new that might improve the past. ~ Clara Barton
Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it! ~ Clara Barton
The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind. ~ Mary Ritter Beard
Viewed narrowly, all life is universal hunger and an expression of energy associated with it. ~ Mary Ritter Beard
Woman's success in lifting men out of their way of life nearly resembling that of the beasts -- who merely hunted and fished for food, who found shelter where they could in jungles, in trees, and caves -- was a civilizing triumph. ~ Mary Ritter Beard
In their quest for rights they have naturally placed emphasis on their wrongs rather than their achievements and possessions, and have retold history as a story of their long martyrdom. ~ Mary Ritter Beard
The volumes which record the history of the human race are filled with the deeds and the words of great men .... The Twentieth Century Woman ... questions the completeness of the story. ~ Mary Ritter Beard
While it is generally agreed that the visible expressions and agencies are necessary instruments, civilization seems to depend far more fundamentally upon the moral and intellectual qualities of human beings -- upon the spirit that animates mankind. ~ Mary Ritter Beard
Unless one's philosophy is all-inclusive, nothing can be understood. ~ Mary Ritter Beard
It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism. ~ Mary Ritter Beard
Life begets life.  Energy creates energy.  It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich. ~ Sarah Bernhardt
It exasperates me to be unable to do anything without being accused of eccentricity.  I had great fun going up in a balloon, but now I dare not do so. I assure you that I have never skinned dogs or burned cats.  And I regret that I cannot prove that I am a natural blonde. ~ Sarah Bernhardt
I have, thanks to my travels, added to my stock all the superstitions of other countries. I know them all now, and in any critical moment of my life, they all rise up in armed legions for or against me. ~ Sarah Bernhardt
Once the curtain is raised, the actor is ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third. ~ Sarah Bernhardt
[C]elebrity .... is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out to right and left, in front and behind, its clammy arms, and gathers in, through its thousand little suckers, all the gossip and slander and praise afloat, to spit out again at the public. ~ Sarah Bernhardt
One should hate very little, because it's extremely fatiguing. One should despise much, forgive often, and never forget. Pardon does not bring with it forgetfulness; at least not for me. ~ Sarah Bernhardt
For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An ~ Sarah Bernhardt
Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you respect for the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
We live in a world which respects power above all things. Power, intelligently directed, can lead to more freedom. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth living. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time, a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
If our people are to fight their way up out of bondage we must arm them with the sword and the shield and the buckler of pride. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything ... that smacks of discrimination or slander. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
I do feel, in my dreamings and yearnings, so undiscovered by those who are able to help me. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
There is a place in God's sun for the youth "farthest down" who has the vision, the determination, and the courage to reach it. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
Faith is the first factor in a life devoted to service. Without it, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
Whatever the white man has done, we have done, and often better. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
You white folks have long been eating the white meat of the chicken. We Negroes are now ready for some of the white meat instead of the dark meat. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
I never stop to plan. I take things step by step. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
Knowledge is the prime need of the hour. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
Cease to be a drudge, seek to be an artist. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
The whole world opened to me when I learned to read. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
From the first, I made my learning, what little it was, useful every way I could. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune
People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow. ~ Erma Bombeck
The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean. ~ Erma Bombeck
Spend at least one Mother's Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him. ~ Erma Bombeck
No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there's a wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick. ~ Erma Bombeck
Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving. ~ Erma Bombeck
Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop offs at tedium and counter productivity. ~ Erma Bombeck
My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch on fire or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one cares. Why should you? ~ Erma Bombeck
Education is so important when it comes to domesticity. I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows. ~ Erma Bombeck
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died. ~ Erma Bombeck
I just clipped 2 articles from a current magazine. One is a diet guaranteed to drop 5 pounds off my body in a weekend. The other is a recipe for a 6 minute pecan pie. ~ Erma Bombeck
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart. ~ Erma Bombeck
We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry is life distilled. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
I wrote about what I saw and heard on the street. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
I don't want to say that these poems have to be simple, but I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music, the picturemaking I've always been interested in. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
Art hurts. Art urges voyages --- and it is easier to stay at home. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
Be careful what you swallow. Chew! ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now... I have hopes for myself. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
If Mary came would Mary ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
If prejudice is native and it is you ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
Put on your rubbers and you won't catch cold. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
Run. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell my children that they just about throw up. ~ Barbara Bush
Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president' s spouse. I wish him well! ~ Barbara Bush
As the wife of an elected official, I feel exactly as the Vice President does to the President. You owe that person, that elected official, your support on the outside. What you say behind closed doors, that's fine. You can voice your own opinion there, but I'm not an elected official. When I am, I expect George Bush to support me! ~ Barbara Bush
If human beings are perceived as potentials rather than problems, as possessing strengths instead of weaknesses, as unlimited rather that dull and unresponsive, then they thrive and grow to their capabilities. ~ Barbara Bush
George Bush and I know the frustration of living with an undiagnosed or untreated learning problem, and we know the great joy and relief that comes when help is finally found. I foresee the day when no American -- neither child nor adult -- will ever need to be limited in learning. ~ Barbara Bush
Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that. ~ Barbara Bush
Some people give time, some money, some their skills and connections, some literally give their life's blood. But everyone has something to give. ~ Barbara Bush
Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others. ~ Barbara Bush
Get involved in some of the big ideas of your time. ~ Barbara Bush
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. ~ Barbara Bush
I think a lot of our problems are because people don't listen to our children. It's not always easy. They're not always so brilliant that you want to spend hours with them. ~ Barbara Bush
The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream, not society's dream, her own personal dream. ~ Barbara Bush
You have to love your children unselfishly. That's hard. But it's the only way. ~ Barbara Bush
You just don't luck into things as much as you'd like to think you do. You build step by step, whether it's friendships or opportunities. ~ Barbara Bush
At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend, or a parent. ~ Barbara Bush
War is not nice. ~ Barbara Bush
Your success as family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens in the White House, but on what happens inside your house. ~ Barbara Bush
Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open. ~ Laura Bush
A love of books, of holding a book, turning its pages, looking at its pictures, and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning. Every child in American should have access to a well-stocked school library. ~ Laura Bush
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone. ~ Laura Bush
Do what you can to show you care about other people, and you will make our world a better place. ~ Rosalynn Carter
If you doubt you can accomplish something, then you can't accomplish it. You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through. ~ Rosalynn Carter
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be. ~ Rosalynn Carter
Times of upheaval require not just more leadership but more leaders. People at all organizational levels, whether anointed or self-appointed, must be empowered to share leadership responsibilities. ~ Rosalynn Carter
There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it. ~ Rosalynn Carter
I think I am the person closest to the President of the United States, and if I can help him understand the countries of the world, then that's what I intend to do. ~ Rosalynn Carter
I had already learned from more than a decade of political life that I was going to be criticized no matter what I did, so I might as well be criticized for something I wanted to do. ~ Rosalynn Carter
Jimmy will let me assume as much responsibility as I will.... Jimmy has always said that we -- the children and myself -- can do anything. ~ Rosalynn Carter
Jimmy's sister Ruth was my best friend and she had a picture of him on the wall in her bedroom. I just thought he was the most handsome young man I'd ever seen. One day I confessed to her that I wished she let me take that photograph home. Because I just thought I had fallen in love with Jimmy Carter. ~ Rosalynn Carter
(About her husband's naval service when he was away at sea) I learned to be very independent. I could take care of myself and the baby and do things that I never dreamed I would be able to do alone. ~ Rosalynn Carter
There was no way I could understand our defeat. I had to grieve over our loss before I could look to the future. Where could our lives possibly be as meaningful as they might have been in the White House? ~ Rosalynn Carter
If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer. ~ Rosalynn Carter
You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, and you don't branch out, you don't try -- you don't take the risk. ~ Rosalynn Carter
Don't worry about polls, but if you do, don't admit it. ~ Rosalynn Carter
Informed journalists can have a significant impact on public understanding of mental health issues, as they shape debate and trends with the words and pictures they convey.... They influence their peers and stimulate discussion among the general public, and an informed public can reduce stigma and discrimination. ~ Rosalynn Carter
There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home. ~ Rosalynn Carter
(President Jimmy Carter about Rosalynn Carter) There's very seldom a decision that I make that I don't discuss with  -- either to tell her after the fact what I've done, or, very frequently, to tell her my options and seek her advice. ~ Rosalynn Carter
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone. ~ Coco Chanel
Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening. ~ Coco Chanel
A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion. ~ Coco Chanel
Fashion is made to become unfashionable. ~ Coco Chanel
[T]here is no fashion for the old. ~ Coco Chanel
Elegance is refusal. ~ Coco Chanel
Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury. ~ Coco Chanel
A woman has the age she deserves. ~ Coco Chanel
Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions. ~ Coco Chanel
Fashion has become a joke. The designers have forgotten that there are women inside the dresses. Most women dress for men and want to be admired. But they must also be able to move, to get into a car without bursting their seams! Clothes must have a natural shape. ~ Coco Chanel
"Where should one use perfume?" a young woman asked. "Wherever one wants to be kissed," I said. ~ Coco Chanel
I don't understand how a woman can leave the house without fixing herself up a little - if only out of politeness. And then, you never know, maybe that's the day she has a date with destiny. And it's best to be as pretty as possible for destiny. ~ Coco Chanel
Legend is the consecration of celebrity. ~ Coco Chanel
My friends, there are no friends. ~ Coco Chanel
Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them. ~ Coco Chanel
There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time. ~ Coco Chanel
Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it. ~ Julia Child
You must have discipline to have fun. ~ Julia Child
Life itself is the proper binge. ~ Julia Child
I think the inner person is the most important.... I would like to see an invention that keeps the mind alert. That's what is important. ~ Julia Child
Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper. ~ Julia Child
Tears mess up your makeup. ~ Julia Child
Everything in moderation, including moderation. ~ Julia Child
Dining with one's friends and beloved family is certainly one of life's primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal. ~ Julia Child
It's fun to get together and have something good to eat at least once a day. That's what human life is all about -- enjoying things. ~ Julia Child
You find yourself refreshed by the presence of cheerful people. Why not make an honest effort to confer that pleasure on others? Half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything gloomy. ~ Julia Child
The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they're right if you love to be with them all of the time. ~ Julia Child
I wouldn't keep him around long if I didn't feed him well. ~ Julia Child
Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet. ~ Julia Child
It took architects years to get established, to show that they weren't just artisans, and that's what I hope will happen with gastronomy. For some reason people don't consider cooking a serious business, but it's like any discipline, and it's a passionate and fascinating one. ~ Julia Child
Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. ~ Julia Child
It's so beautifully arranged on the plate -- you know someone's fingers have been all over it. ~ Julia Child
This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook -- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun! ~ Julia Child
You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients. ~ Julia Child
Once you have mastered a technique, you barely have to look at a recipe again. ~ Julia Child
Be a fearless cook! Try out new ideas and new recipes, but always buy the freshest and finest ingredients, whatever they may be. Furnish your kitchen with the most solid and workmanlike equipment you can find. Keep your knives ever sharp and -- ~ Julia Child
The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a 'What the hell?' attitude. ~ Julia Child
Always remember: If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know? ~ Julia Child
In department stores, so much kitchen equipment is bought indiscriminately by people who just come in for men's underwear. ~ Julia Child
I think every woman should have a blowtorch. ~ Julia Child
Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need. ~ Julia Child
The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken. Bon appetit. {attributed} ~ Julia Child
In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. ~ Julia Child
After one taste of French food ... I was hooked. I'd never eaten like that before, I didn't know such food existed. The wonderful attention paid to each detail of the meal was incredible to me. I'd never really drunk good wine before, and knew nothing at all about it. It was simply a whole new life experience. ~ Julia Child
Cassoulet, that best of bean feasts, is everyday fare for a peasant but ambrosia for a gastronome, though its ideal consumer is a 300-pound blocking back who has been splitting firewood nonstop for the last twelve hours on a subzero day in Manitoba. ~ Julia Child
It is the Americans who have managed to crown minced beef as hamburger, and to send it round the world so that even the fussy French have taken to le boeuf hache, le hambourgaire. ~ Julia Child
How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like Kleenex? ~ Julia Child
I want history to remember me not just as the first black woman to be elected to Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and dared to be herself. ~ Shirley Chisholm
Of my two "handicaps" being female put more obstacles in my path than being black. ~ Shirley Chisholm
I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black. ~ Shirley Chisholm
My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. ~ Shirley Chisholm
Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deepseated, that it is invisible because it is so normal. ~ Shirley Chisholm
We Americans have a chance to become someday a nation in which all racial stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically. ~ Shirley Chisholm
In the end antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing - antihumanism. ~ Shirley Chisholm
My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency. ~ Shirley Chisholm
At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else. ~ Shirley Chisholm
I am, was, and always will be a catalyst for change. ~ Shirley Chisholm
There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price. ~ Shirley Chisholm
One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian. ~ Shirley Chisholm
... rhetoric never won a revolution yet. ~ Shirley Chisholm
Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt. ~ Shirley Chisholm
Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth. (attributed -- also attributed to Marian Wright Edelman) ~ Shirley Chisholm
The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new. ~ Pema Chodron
We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves. ~ Pema Chodron
If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher. ~ Pema Chodron
There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness. ~ Pema Chodron
Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live. - ~ Pema Chodron
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. ~ Pema Chodron
A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us. ~ Pema Chodron
Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. ~ Pema Chodron
There cannot be true democracy unless women's voices are heard. There cannot be true democracy unless women are given the opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives. There cannot be true democracy unless all citizens are able to participate fully in the lives of their country. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
The challenges of change are always hard. It is important that we begin to unpack those challenges that confront this nation and realize that we each have a role that requires us to change and become more responsible for shaping our own future. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
The failure was principally political and policy driven, there were many interests that weren't at all happy about losing their financial stake in a way that the system currently operates, but I think I became a lightning rod for some of that criticism. [about her role, as First Lady, in attempting to win reforms in health care coverage] ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
In the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said 70 times 7. Well, I want you all to know that I'm keeping a chart. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
I have gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained pretty constant; individual responsibility and community. I do not see those as being mutually inconsistent. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
I'm not some Tammy Wynette standing by my man. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
I have met thousands and thousands of pro-choice men and women. I have never met anyone who is pro-abortion. Being pro-choice is not being pro-abortion. Being pro-choice is trusting the individual to make the right decision for herself and her family, and not entrusting that decision to anyone wearing the authority of government in any regard. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
Eleanor Roosevelt understood that every one of us every day has choices to make about the kind of person we are and what we wish to become. You can decide to be someone who brings people together, or you can fall prey to those who wish to divide us. You can be someone who educates yourself, or you can believe that being negative is clever and being cynical is fashionable. You have a choice. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
When I am talking about "It Takes a Village", I'm obviously not talking just about or even primarily about geographical villages any longer, but about the network of relationships and values that do connect us and binds us together. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
No government can love a child, and no policy can substitute for a family's care. But at the same time, government can either support or undermine families as they cope with moral, social and economic stresses of caring for children. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
We are Americans, We have the right to participate and debate any administration. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
Our lives are a mixture of different roles. Most of us are doing the best we can to find whatever the right balance is . . . For me, that balance is family, work, and service. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton
I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer. ~ Colette
A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up. ~ Colette
What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner. ~ Colette
If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles. ~ Colette
Be happy. It's one way of being wise. ~ Colette
Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger. ~ Colette
We only do well the things we like doing. ~ Colette
Hope costs nothing. ~ Colette
On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us - ah! what a dream, to live in that! - the other stifles us at the first breath. ~ Colette
By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet. ~ Colette
Writing only leads to more writing. ~ Colette
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~ Colette
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen. ~ Colette
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one. ~ Colette
Total absence of humor renders life impossible. ~ Colette
Don't ever wear artistic jewellery; it wrecks a woman's reputation. ~ Colette
It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship. ~ Colette
What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised! ~ Colette
Give me a dozen such heartbreaks, if that would help me lose a couple of pounds. ~ Colette
The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before. ~ Colette
Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for a longer time at what pains you. ~ Colette
For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance. ~ Colette
Let's buy a pack of cards, good wine, bridge scores, knitting needles, all the paraphernalia needed to fill an enormous void, everything needed to hide that horror -- the old woman. ~ Colette
The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time. ~ Colette
My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved. ~ Colette
The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives. ~ Colette
When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes. ~ Colette
A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts. ~ Colette
Her childhood, then her adolescence, had taught her patience, hope, silence and the easy manipulation of the weapons and virtues of all prisoners. ~ Colette
It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place. ~ Colette
There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion. ~ Colette
Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave. ~ Colette
Boredom helps one to make decisions. ~ Colette
You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, "Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there -- school, marriage, babies, career." The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness. ~ Ruby Dee
That's what being young is all about. You have the courage and the daring to think that you can make a difference. You're not prone to measure your energies in time. You're not likely to live by equations. ~ Ruby Dee
Classism and greed are making insignificant all the other kinds of isms. ~ Ruby Dee
The greatest gift is not being afraid to question. ~ Ruby Dee
Paradise is to be the ultimate instrument, fulfilling God's desperate intent that we love each other. ~ Ruby Dee
The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within  -- strength, courage, dignity. ~ Ruby Dee
God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear. ~ Ruby Dee
OK, boss, I don't mind shuffling, but I won't scratch my head. ~ Ruby Dee
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. ~ Emily Dickinson
We meet no Stranger, but Ourself ~ Emily Dickinson
The soul should always stand ajar. Ready to welcome the ecstatic experience. ~ Emily Dickinson
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. ~ Emily Dickinson
I believe the love of God may be taught not to seem like bears. ~ Emily Dickinson
The Soul selects her own society ~ Emily Dickinson
If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn, why not we? ~ Susan Gilbert Dickinson
All of my life I have always had the urge to do things better than anybody else. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
You can't win them all -- but you can try. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
I am out to beat everybody in sight, and that is just what I'm going to do. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
You have to play by the rules of golf just as you have to live by the rules of life. There's no other way. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Study the rules so that you won't beat yourself by not knowing something. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Before I was in my teens, I knew exactly what I wanted to be: I wanted to be the best athlete who ever lived. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Luck? Sure. But only after long practice and only with the ability to think under pressure. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
The formula for success is simple: practice and concentration then more practice and more concentration. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
The more you practice, the better. But in any case, practice more than you play. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Practice, which some regard as a chore, should be approached as just about the most pleasant recreation ever devised, besides being a necessary part of golf. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
It's not enough just to swing at the ball. You've got to loosen your girdle and let 'er fly. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Golf is a game of coordination, rhythm and grace; women have these to a high degree. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Good golf is easier to play -- and far more pleasant -- than bad golf. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Before I was ever in my teens, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. My goal was to be the greatest athlete that ever lived. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Winning has always meant much to me, but winning friends has meant the most. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
You know when there's a star, like in show business, the star has her name in lights on the marquee! Right? And the star gets the money because the people come to see the star, right? Well, I'm the star, and all of you are in the chorus. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
As long as I'm improving, I will go on, and besides, there's too much money in the business to quit. ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
The Babe is here. Who's coming in second? ~ Babe Didrikson Zaharias
I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia's Blue Ridge... ~ Annie Dillard
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. ~ Annie Dillard
Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you. ~ Annie Dillard
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. ~ Annie Dillard
You can't test courage cautiously. ~ Annie Dillard
The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart. ~ Annie Dillard
No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? ~ Annie Dillard
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go! ~ Annie Dillard
If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. ~ Annie Dillard
Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees. ~ Annie Dillard
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. ~ Annie Dillard
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. ~ Annie Dillard
Why are we watching the news, reading the news keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy -- possibly a necessary lie -- that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. ~ Annie Dillard
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. ~ Annie Dillard
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator -- our very self-consciousness -- is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution. ~ Annie Dillard
I have never read any theologian who claims God is particularly interested in religion, anyway. ~ Annie Dillard
One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war," says Ernest Becker, is that "each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die. ~ Annie Dillard
Women share with men the need for personal success, even the taste of power, and no longer are we willing to satisfy those needs through the achievements of surrogates, whether husbands, children, or merely role models. ~ Elizabeth Dole
We have learned that power is a positive force if it is used for positive purposes. ~ Elizabeth Dole
What you always do before you make a decision is consult.  The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted. Then, once policy is determined, you call on them to help you sell it. ~ Elizabeth Dole
If our leaders are not worthy, we have the power to elect leaders who are. ~ Elizabeth Dole
We aim to give a 'wake-up call' to businesses, to alert them to the fact that the next 'fair-haired boy' of their organization just might be a woman. ~ Elizabeth Dole
My objective as Secretary of Labor is to look through the 'glass ceiling' to see who is on the other side, and to serve as a catalyst for change. ~ Elizabeth Dole
That would be a disaster for humanitarian organizations without that charitable deduction, and for a lot of homeowners without the mortgage deduction as well. ~ Elizabeth Dole
Marriage between a man and a woman isn't something Republicans invented, but it is something Republicans will defend. ~ Elizabeth Dole
We must return teaching to the heart of the educational enterprise. Teaching needs to be supported, not only by rewarding excellence in teaching, but by placing the training of teachers at the center of our higher education system. If teaching is to become a prestigious profession, teachers must undergo rigorous training and hold prestigious degrees. ~ Elizabeth Dole
Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price. ~ Amelia Earhart
After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the esthetic appeal of flying. ~ Amelia Earhart
Adventure is worthwhile in itself. ~ Amelia Earhart
The most effective way to do it, is to do it. ~ Amelia Earhart
I want to do something useful in the world. ~ Amelia Earhart
Please know that I am quite aware of the hazards. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others. [Last letter to her husband before her last flight.] ~ Amelia Earhart
Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats. But, they also get more notoriety when they crash. ~ Amelia Earhart
The effect of having other interests beyond those domestic works well. The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship. ~ Amelia Earhart
The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune. ~ Amelia Earhart
One of my favorite phobias is that girls, especially those whose tastes aren't routine, often don't get a fair break.... It has come down through the generations, an inheritance of age-old customs which produced the corollary that women are bred to timidity. ~ Amelia Earhart
... now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done -- occasionally what men have not done -- thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action. Some such consideration was a contributing reason for my wanting to do what I so much wanted to do. ~ Amelia Earhart
My ambition is to have this wonderful gift produce practical results for the future of commercial flying and for the women who may want to fly tomorrow's planes. ~ Amelia Earhart
In soloing -- as in other activities -- it is far easier to start something than it is to finish it. ~ Amelia Earhart
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward. ~ Amelia Earhart
Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do. ~ Amelia Earhart
Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done. ~ Amelia Earhart
Anticipation, I suppose, sometimes exceeds realization. ~ Amelia Earhart
There are two kinds of stones, as everyone knows, one of which rolls. ~ Amelia Earhart
Worry retards reaction and makes clear-cut decisions impossible. ~ Amelia Earhart
Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture. ~ Amelia Earhart
Amelia is a grand person for such a trip. She is the only woman flyer I would care to make such an expedition with. Because in addition to being a fine companion and pilot, she can take hardship as well as a man -- and work like one. ~ Amelia Earhart
Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
You really can change the world if you care enough. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
Service is what life is all about. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
When I fight about what is going on in the neighborhood, or when I fight about what is happening to other people's children, I'm doing that because I want to leave a community and a world that is better than the one I found. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
The inability to get health care because people lack insurance, kills, less traumatically, and less visibly than terrorism, but the result is the same. And poor housing and poor education and low wages kills the spirit and the capacity and the quality of life that all of us deserve. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
I don't care what my children choose to do professionally, just as long as within their choices they understand they've got to give something back. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
Being considerate of others will take you and your children further in life than any college or professional degree. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
Whoever said anybody has a right to give up? ~ Marian Wright Edelman
No person has the right to rain on your dreams. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, "Let all children come unto me." ~ Marian Wright Edelman
Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
The 1990s struggle is for America's conscience and future -- a future that is being determined right now in the bodies and minds and spirits of every American child. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
The fact is we made dramatic progress in the 1960s in eradicating hunger and improving the health status of children, and then we just stopped trying. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
One dollar up front prevents the spending of many dollars down the road. ~ Marian Wright Edelman
My goal is to be accused of being strident. ~ Susan Faludi
Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to "choose" between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves -- instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men. ~ Susan Faludi
The internal qualities once said to embody manhood - sure footedness, inner strength, confidence of purpose -- are merchandised to men to enhance their manliness. What passes for masculinity is being extracted and sold back to men. Literally in the case of Viagra. ~ Susan Faludi
Women are enslaved by their own liberation. ~ Susan Faludi
The demand that women "return to femininity" is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful. ~ Susan Faludi
As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it. ~ Susan Faludi
Tonight, the daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for vice president in the new land my father came to love. ~ Geraldine Ferraro
We fought hard. We gave it our best. We did what was right and we made a difference. ~ Geraldine Ferraro
We've chosen the path to equality; don't let them turn us around. ~ Geraldine Ferraro
You don't have to have fought in a war to love peace. ~ Geraldine Ferraro
I'd call it a new version of voodoo economics, but I'm afraid that would give witch doctors a bad name. ~ Geraldine Ferraro
It was not so very long ago that people thought that semiconductors were part-time orchestra leaders and microchips were very, very small snack foods. ~ Geraldine Ferraro
Vice president - it has such a nice ring to it! ~ Geraldine Ferraro
Modern life is confusing - no "Ms. take" about it. ~ Geraldine Ferraro
I don't want to live -- I want to love first, and live incidentally. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace? ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
Oh, the secret life of man and woman -- dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
It's very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled "the past," and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
Mr. Fitzgerald -- I believe that is how he spells his name -- seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
The IWW has been accused of pushing women to the front. This is not true. Rather, the women have not been kept in back, and so they have naturally moved to the front. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
It is my hope that the workers will not only "sabotage" the supply of products, but also the over-supply of producers. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
They did not believe in making any contracts. They believed that as long as you were organized, you could hold the office to what it said it was going to do. But a contract, a piece of paper held you and so they didn't make any contracts. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Why did good hard-working people suffer so? Why were men who were willing, able, and anxious to work, denied jobs? Why was there so much unemployment? Why were there rich people who apparently did little but enjoyed life? ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
We never heard of vacations, let alone vacations with pay. We never heard of seniority as it is understood today. There were no pensions for retirement of workers. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
There has been labor protection by law but there has also been labor repression by law. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all. ~ Betty Friedan
The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way. ~ Betty Friedan
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim. ~ Betty Friedan
When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman. ~ Betty Friedan
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. ~ Betty Friedan
The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. ~ Betty Friedan
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. ~ Betty Friedan
A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination. ~ Betty Friedan
The problem that has no name -- which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities -- is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease. ~ Betty Friedan
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- "Is this all?" ~ Betty Friedan
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. ~ Betty Friedan
It is ridiculous to tell girls to be quiet when they enter a new field, or an old one, so the men will not notice they are there. A girl should not expect special privileges, because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination. ~ Betty Friedan
Men weren't really the enemy -- they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill. ~ Betty Friedan
Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework - an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. ~ Betty Friedan
It isn't that I have stopped being a feminist, but women as a separate interest group are not my concern anymore. ~ Betty Friedan
If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based. ~ Betty Friedan
Aging will create the music of the coming century. ~ Betty Friedan
You can show more of the reality of yourself instead of hding behind a mask for fear of revealing too much. ~ Betty Friedan
Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength. ~ Betty Friedan
Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth. ~ Betty Friedan
It's a different stage of life, and if you are going to pretend it's youth, you are going to miss it. You are going to miss the surprises, the possibilities, and the evolution that we are just beginning to know about because there are n role models and there are no guideposts and there are no signs. ~ Betty Friedan
Nicholas Lemann: "Feminism is diverse and contentious, but, in its current manifestation, it began with the work of a single person: Friedan." ~ Betty Friedan
Ellen Wilson, in response to Friedan's ~ Betty Friedan
I hope that I have accomplished just one thing: that I have been a credit to tennis and my country. ~ Althea Gibson
I want the public to remember me as they knew me: athletic, smart, and healthy.... Remember me strong and tough and quick, fleet of foot and tenacious. ~ Althea Gibson
I always wanted to be somebody. If I made it, it's half because I was game enough to take a lot of punishment along the way and half because there were a lot of people who cared enough to help me. ~ Althea Gibson
I don't want to be put on a pedestal. I just want to be reasonably successful and live a normal life with all the conveniences to make it so. I think I've already got the main thing I've always wanted, which is to be somebody, to have identity. I'm Althea Gibson, the tennis champion. I hope it makes me happy. ~ Althea Gibson
No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you. ~ Althea Gibson
In the field of sports you are more or less accepted for what you do rather than what you are. ~ Althea Gibson
I knew that I was an unusual, talented girl through the grace of God. I didn't need to prove that to myself. I only wanted to prove it to my opponents. ~ Althea Gibson
In sports, you simply aren't considered a real champion until you have defended your title successfully. Winning it once can be a fluke; winning it twice proves you are the best. ~ Althea Gibson
Most of us who aspire to be tops in our fields don't really consider the amount of work required to stay tops. ~ Althea Gibson
People thought I was ruthless, which I was. I didn't give a darn who was on the other side of the net. I'd knock you down if you got in my way. ~ Althea Gibson
I just wanted to play, play, play. ~ Althea Gibson
I was born too soon. ~ Althea Gibson
All things I do are in every woman. Every woman is Medea. Every woman is Jocasta. There comes a time when a woman is a mother to her husband. Clytemnestra is every woman when she kills. ~ Martha Graham
You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost. ~ Martha Graham
Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can. ~ Martha Graham
The body is a sacred garment. ~ Martha Graham
There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. ~ Martha Graham
The body says what words cannot. ~ Martha Graham
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body. ~ Martha Graham
Our arms start from the back because they were once wings. ~ Martha Graham
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that the others are behind the time. ~ Martha Graham
Dance is the hidden language of the soul. ~ Martha Graham
Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery. ~ Martha Graham
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion. ~ Martha Graham
Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain. ~ Martha Graham
I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being. ~ Martha Graham
I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination. There is a great deal of outer space, distant from our daily lives, where I feel our imagination wanders sometimes. It will find a planet or it will not find a planet, and that is what a dancer does. ~ Martha Graham
We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance. ~ Martha Graham
Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle, and the dance is a celebration of that miracle. ~ Martha Graham
Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths. ~ Martha Graham
We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. ~ Martha Graham
It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely. ~ Martha Graham
Misery is a communicable disease. ~ Martha Graham
In 1980. a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, "Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability." I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable. ~ Martha Graham
I'm asked so often at ninety-six whether I believe in life after death. I do believe in the sanctity of life, the continuity of life and of energy. I know the anonimity of death has no appeal for me. It is the now that I must face and want to face. ~ Martha Graham
I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
To support whatever is right, and to bring in justice where we've had so much injustice. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
Nobody's free until everybody's free. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
We serve God by serving our fellow man; kids are suffering from malnutrition. People are going to the fields hungry. If you are a Christian, we are tired of being mistreated. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
The landowner said I would have to go back to withdraw or I would have to leave and so I told him I didn't go down there to register for him, I was down there to register for myself. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
They just kept beating me and telling me, "You nigger bitch, we're gonna make you wish you were dead." ... Every day of my life I pay with the misery of that beating. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
We are sick and tired of our people having to go to Vietnam and other places to fight for something we don't have here. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually -- without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts? This is what I puzzle about. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
... if by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved... ~ Lorraine Hansberry
A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men -- and people in general. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
... the oppressed are by their nature ... forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
Both of my parents were strong-minded, civic-minded, exceptionally race-minded people who made enormous sacrifices on behalf of the struggle for civil rights throughout their lifetimes. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
I am ashamed of being alone. Or is it my loneliness that I am ashamed of? I have closed the shutters so that no one can see. Me. Alone. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and--I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
Children see things very well sometimes -- and idealists even better. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
We only revert back to mystical ideas - which includes most contemporary orthodox religious views, in my opinion - because we simply are confronted with some things we don't yet understand. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace? ~ Lorraine Hansberry
Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams -- but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
If you worry about who is going to get credit, you don't get much work done. ~ Dorothy Height
Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach his goals. ~ Dorothy Height
I want to be remembered as someone who used herself and anything she could touch to work for justice and freedom.... I want to be remembered as one who tried. ~ Dorothy Height
A Negro woman has the same kind of problems as other women, but she can't take the same things for granted. ~ Dorothy Height
It was not easy for those of us who had become symbols of the struggle for equality to see our children raising their fists in defiant contradiction of all we had fought for. ~ Dorothy Height
No one will do for you what you need to do for yourself. We cannot afford to be separate. ~ Dorothy Height
We have to see that all of us are in the same boat. ~ Dorothy Height
But we're all in the same boat now, and we've got to learn to work together. ~ Dorothy Height
We are not a problem people; we are a people with problems. We have historic strengths; we have survived because of family. ~ Dorothy Height
We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity. ~ Dorothy Height
Without community service, we would not have a strong quality of life. It's important to the person who serves as well as the recipient. It's the way in which we ourselves grow and develop. ~ Dorothy Height
We've got to work to save our children and do it with full respect for the fact that if we do not, no one else is going to do it. ~ Dorothy Height
There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions. ~ Dorothy Height
The Black family of the future will foster our liberation, enhance our self-esteem, and shape our ideas and goals. ~ Dorothy Height
I believe we hold in our hands the power once again to shape not only our own but the nation's future -- a future that is based on developing an agenda that radically challenges limitations in our economic development, educational achievement and political empowerment. Undoubtedly, African-Americans will have an integral role to play, although our path ahead will continue to be complex and difficult. ~ Dorothy Height
As we move forward, let us also look back. So long as we remember those who died for our right to vote and those like John H. Johnson who built empires where there were none, we will walk into the future with unity and strength. ~ Dorothy Height
I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around wondering about yourself. ~ Katharine Hepburn
If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living.. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four. ~ Katharine Hepburn
When I started out, I didn't have any desire to be an actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Everyone thought I was bold and fearless and even arrogant, but inside I was always quaking. ~ Katharine Hepburn
If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased. ~ Katharine Hepburn
If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Without discipline, there's no life at all. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Enemies are so stimulating. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Loved people are loving people. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get -- only what you are expecting to give -- which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then. ~ Katharine Hepburn
Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about. ~ Katharine Hepburn
If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married. ~ Katharine Hepburn
One of the major reasons women who know give for the absolute necessity of an ERA [ ~ Barbara Honegger
In my early days I was a sepia Hedy Lamarr. Now I'm black and a woman, singing my own way. ~ Lena Horne
I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked. ~ Lena Horne
Always be smarter than the people who hire you. ~ Lena Horne
Don't be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it's just death. ~ Lena Horne
It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it. ~ Lena Horne
You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way. ~ Lena Horne
It's ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do. ~ Lena Horne
The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness. ~ Julia Ward Howe
Every life has its actual blanks, which the ideal must fill up, or which else remain bare and profitless forever. ~ Julia Ward Howe
I am confirmed in my division of human energies. Ambitious people climb, but faithful people build. ~ Julia Ward Howe
When I see the elaborate study and ingenuity displayed by women in the pursuit of trifles, I feel no doubt of their capacity for the most herculean undertakings. ~ Julia Ward Howe
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored... ~ Julia Ward Howe
Arise then, women of this day! ... ~ Julia Ward Howe
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. ~ Julia Ward Howe
I think nothing is religion which puts one individual absolutely above others, and surely nothing is religion which puts one sex above another.... ~ Julia Ward Howe
Any religion which sacrifices women to the brutality of men is no religion.... ~ Julia Ward Howe
Marriage, like death, is a debt we owe to nature. ~ Julia Ward Howe
A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far. ~ Fannie Hurst
Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it. ~ Fannie Hurst
Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing. ~ Fannie Hurst
It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to. ~ Fannie Hurst
The power of the Holy Spirit dwelleth perfectly in every believer, and the inward revelations of her own spirit, and the conscious judgment of her own mind are of authority paramount to any word of God. ~ Anne Hutchinson
I conceive there lies a clear rule in Titus that the elder women should instruct the younger and then I must have a time wherein I must do it. ~ Anne Hutchinson
Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court? ~ Anne Hutchinson
I am called here to answer before you, but I hear no things laid to my charge. ~ Anne Hutchinson
I desire to know wherefore I am banished? ~ Anne Hutchinson
Will it please you to answer me this and to give me a rule for then I will willingly submit to any truth. ~ Anne Hutchinson
I do here speak it before the court. I look that the Lord should deliver me by his providence. ~ Anne Hutchinson
If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true. ~ Anne Hutchinson
The Lord judges not as man judges.  Better to be cast out of the church than to deny Christ. ~ Anne Hutchinson
A Christian is not bound to the law. ~ Anne Hutchinson
But now having seen him which is invisible I fear not what man can do unto me. ~ Anne Hutchinson
What from the Church at Boston? I know no such church, neither will I own it. Call it the whore and strumpet of Boston, no Church of Christ! ~ Anne Hutchinson
You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul; and assure yourselves thus much, you do as much as in you lies to put the Lord Jesus Christ from you, and if you go on in this course you begin, you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. ~ Anne Hutchinson
He that denies the testament denies the testator, and in this did open unto me and give me to see that those which did not teach the new covenant had the spirit of antichrist, and upon this he did discover the ministry unto me; and ever since, I bless the Lord, he hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong. ~ Anne Hutchinson
For you see this scripture fulfilled this day and therefore I desire you as you tender the Lord and the church and commonwealth to consider and look what you do. ~ Anne Hutchinson
But after he was pleased to reveal himself to me I did presently, like Abraham, run to Hagar. And after that he did let me see the atheism of my own heart, for which I begged of the Lord that it might not remain in my heart. ~ Anne Hutchinson
I have been guilty of wrong thinking. ~ Anne Hutchinson
They thought that I did conceive there was a difference between them and Mr. Cotton... I might say they might preach a covenant of works as did the apostles, but to preach a covenant of works and to be under a covenant of works is another business. ~ Anne Hutchinson
One may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another... But when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth. ~ Anne Hutchinson
I pray, Sir, prove it that I said they preached nothing but a covenant of works. ~ Anne Hutchinson
The first rule of holes: when you're in one, stop digging. ~ Molly Ivins
What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority. ~ Molly Ivins
Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. ~ Molly Ivins
The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion. ~ Molly Ivins
Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. ~ Molly Ivins
There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity -- like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule -- that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar. ~ Molly Ivins
I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth. ~ Molly Ivins
You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to. ~ Molly Ivins
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. ~ Molly Ivins
What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols. ~ Molly Ivins
There's never been a law yet that didn't have a ridiculous consequence in some unusual situation; there's probably never been a government program that didn't accidentally benefit someone it wasn't intended to. Most people who work in government understand that what you do about it is fix the problem -- you don't just attack the whole government. ~ Molly Ivins
I believe in practicing prudence at least once every two or three years. ~ Molly Ivins
It's hard to argue against cynics -- they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side. ~ Molly Ivins
Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant - it tends to get worse. ~ Molly Ivins
I still believe in Hope - mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas. ~ Molly Ivins
One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't waste a lot of time thinking about the people who built their pyramids, either. OK, so it's not that bad yet -- but it's getting that bad. ~ Molly Ivins
It's like, duh. Just when you thought there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, the Republicans go and prove you're wrong. ~ Molly Ivins
Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory. ~ Molly Ivins
During a recent panel on the numerous failures of American journalism, I proposed that almost all stories about government should begin: "Look out! They're about to smack you around again!" ~ Molly Ivins
There have been lots of other women who had the talent and ability before me.  I think this can be seen as an affirmation that we're moving ahead. And I hope it means that I'm just the first in a long line. (interview, on being selected as an astronaut) ~ Mae Jemison
More women should demand to be involved. It's our right. This is one area where we can get in on the ground floor and possibly help to direct where space exploration will go in the future ~ Mae Jemison
The thing that I have done throughout my life is to do the best job that I can and to be me. ~ Mae Jemison
People may see astronauts and because the majority are white males, they tend to think it has nothing to do with them. But it does. ~ Mae Jemison
I want to make sure we use all our talent, not just 25 percent. ~ Mae Jemison
Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. ~ Mae Jemison
Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations...If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won't exist because you'll have already shut it out ... You can hear other people's wisdom, but you've got to re-evaluate the world for yourself. ~ Mae Jemison
It is important for scientists to be aware of what our discoveries mean, socially and politically. It's a noble goal that science should be apolitical, acultural, and asocial, but it can't be, because it's done by people who are all those things. ~ Mae Jemison
Science is very important to me, but I also like to stress that you have to be well-rounded. One's love for science doesn't get rid of all the other areas. I truly feel someone interested in science is interested in understanding what's going on in the world. That means you have to find out about social science, art, and politics. ~ Mae Jemison
No one should have to dance backwards all their life. ~ Jill Johnston
Telling it like it is means telling it like it was and how it is now that it isn't what it was to the is now people. ~ Jill Johnston
It's necessary in order to attract attention, to dazzle at all costs, to be disapproved of by serious people, and quoted by the foolish. ~ Jill Johnston
It costs a lot of money to go into cafes to breastfeed when out in public. Not everyone has the money to do that. Yet, at the same time, it is often people with the least money and accompanying health inequalities that are most likely to benefit from breastfeeding. ~ Jill Johnston
Writing is employing the chief tool of culture to add to the global chatter as stylishly as possible with the moral imperative of underscoring the absurdity of culture. ~ Jill Johnston
The inmates are ghosts whose dreams have been murdered. ~ Jill Johnston
All of life seems like that. Once we settle into some phase or other, and become attached to it, some unknown force makes us move on, only death obviously relieving us from these exhausting cycles. ~ Jill Johnston
The American dream is not dead.  It is gasping for breath, but it is not dead. ~ Barbara Jordan
I never intended to become a run-of-the-mill person. ~ Barbara Jordan
A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers, when bitterness and self-interest seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny. ~ Barbara Jordan
One thing is clear to me: We, as human beings, must be willing to accept people who are different from ourselves. ~ Barbara Jordan
If you're going to play the game properly you'd better know every rule. ~ Barbara Jordan
If you are politically inclined, you may be President of the United States.
All my growth and development led me to believe that if you really do the right thing, and if you play by the rules, and if you've got good enough, solid judgment and common sense, that you're going to be able to do whatever you want to do with your life. ~ Barbara Jordan
We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, but we can find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny. (from her 1976 speech at the Democratic National Convention ~ Barbara Jordan
Just remember the world is not a playground but a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday but an education. One eternal lesson for us all: to teach us how better we should love. ~ Barbara Jordan
We want to be in control of our lives. Whether we are jungle fighters, craftsmen, company men, gamesmen, we want to be in control. And when the government erodes that control, we are not comfortable. ~ Barbara Jordan
If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority. ~ Barbara Jordan
The imperative is to define what is right and do it. ~ Barbara Jordan
What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise. ~ Barbara Jordan
Justice of right is always to take precedence over might. ~ Barbara Jordan
I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration. ~ Frida Kahlo
I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best. ~ Frida Kahlo
My painting carries with it the message of pain. ~ Frida Kahlo
Painting completed my life. ~ Frida Kahlo
His capacity for work breaks clocks and calendars. [on Diego Rivera] ~ Frida Kahlo
I cannot speak of Diego as my husband because that term, when applied to him, is an absurdity. He never has been, nor will he ever be, anybody's husband. ~ Frida Kahlo
The most interesting thing about the so-called lies of Diego is that, sooner or later, the ones involved in the imaginary tale get angry, not because of the lies, but because of the truth contained in the lies, which always comes forth. ~ Frida Kahlo
They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore....I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris. [on Andre Breton and the European surrealists] ~ Frida Kahlo
I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was. ~ Frida Kahlo
O'Keefe was in the hospital for three months, she went to Bermuda for a rest. She didn't make love to me that time, I think on account of her weakness. Too bad. ~ Frida Kahlo
Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed. ~ Corita Kent
Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries. ~ Corita Kent
Maybe we are less than our dreams, but that less would make us more than some Gods would dream of. ~ Corita Kent
Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is "to fit together" and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating - whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day. ~ Corita Kent
That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness. ~ Corita Kent
A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it. ~ Corita Kent
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas? ~ Jean Kerr
Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house. ~ Jean Kerr
The only thing worse than a man you can't control is a man you can. ~ Jean Kerr
A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, anymore than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table. ~ Jean Kerr
Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left. ~ Jean Kerr
I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it. ~ Jean Kerr
If you can keep your head about you when all about you are losing theirs, its just possible you haven't grasped the situation. ~ Jean Kerr
Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them. ~ Jean Kerr
Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze? ~ Jean Kerr
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth. ~ Jean Kerr
Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite. ~ Jean Kerr
Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself -- like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks. ~ Jean Kerr
Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it. ~ Jean Kerr
The real menace about dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old. ~ Jean Kerr
Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent. ~ Jean Kerr
A poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money will help. ~ Jean Kerr
One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind. ~ Jean Kerr
I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on. ~ Jean Kerr
If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out. ~ Jean Kerr
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible. ~ Jean Kerr
Even though a number of people have tried, no one has ever found a way to drink for a living. ~ Jean Kerr
When the grandmothers of today hear the word "Chippendales," they don't necessary think of chairs. ~ Jean Kerr
Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation. ~ Coretta Scott King
Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul. ~ Coretta Scott King
If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children. ~ Coretta Scott King
The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members, ... a heart of grace and a soul generated by love. ~ Coretta Scott King
Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated. ~ Coretta Scott King
There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance.  Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens. ~ Coretta Scott King
My husband was a man who hoped to be a Baptist preacher to a large, Southern, urban congregation. Instead, by the time he died in 1968, he had led millions of people into shattering forever the Southern system of segregation of the races. ~ Coretta Scott King
In spite of Martin's being away so much, he was wonderful with his children, and they adored him. When Daddy was home it was something special. ~ Coretta Scott King
Martin was an unusual person.... He was so alive and so much fun to be with. He had strength that he imparted to me and others that he met. ~ Coretta Scott King
The more visible signs of protest are gone, but I think there is a realization that the tactics of the late-60s are not sufficient to meet the challenges of the 70s. ~ Coretta Scott King
Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people. ~ Coretta Scott King
Mama and Daddy King represent the best in manhood and womanhood, the best in a marriage, the kind of people we are trying to become. ~ Coretta Scott King
I'm fulfilled in what I do... I never thought that a lot of money or fine clothes -- the finer things of life -- would make you happy. My concept of happiness is to be filled in a spiritual sense. ~ Coretta Scott King
When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. ~ Maggie Kuhn
Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many. ~ Maggie Kuhn
Old age is not a disease -- it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses. ~ Maggie Kuhn
Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind -- even if your voice shakes. ~ Maggie Kuhn
The worst indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name. ~ Maggie Kuhn
By the year 2020, the year of perfect vision, the old will outnumber the young. ~ Maggie Kuhn
Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We can no longer afford to scrap-pile people. ~ Maggie Kuhn
There must be a goal at every stage of life! There must be a goal! ~ Maggie Kuhn
What its children become, that will the community become. ~ Suzanne La Follette
It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly. ~ Suzanne La Follette
No one who has not known the inestimable privilege can possibly realize what good fortune it is to grow up in a home where there are grandparents. ~ Suzanne La Follette
When one hears the argument that marriage should be indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood. ~ Suzanne La Follette
Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody. ~ Suzanne La Follette
Most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word "human." ~ Suzanne La Follette
There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained. ~ Suzanne La Follette
Where is the society which does not struggle along under a dead-weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfather? ~ Suzanne La Follette
The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured. ~ Suzanne La Follette
All political and religious systems have their root and their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and in its intense fear of autonomy. ~ Suzanne La Follette
When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing. ~ Gerda Lerner
[W]omen's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation. ~ Gerda Lerner
There is an ironic significance in the fact that the very term used to describe the new field Women's History is a misnomer. ~ Gerda Lerner
Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin "helping" them. Such a world does not exist -- never has. ~ Gerda Lerner
Women have always made history as much as men have, not 'contributed' to it, only they did not know what they had made and had no tools to interpret their own experience. What's new at this time is that women are fully claiming their past and shaping the tools by means of which they can interpret it. ~ Gerda Lerner
What are patriarchal values? Simply, the assumption that the fact of biological sex differences implies a God-given or at least a "natural" separation of human activities by sex, and the further assumption that this leads to a "natural" dominance of male over female. ~ Gerda Lerner
Abandoning the search for an empowering past -- the search for matriarchy -- is one step in the right direction. The creation of compensatory myths of the distant past of women will not emancipate women in the present and the future. ~ Gerda Lerner
Nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife -- a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day. ~ Gerda Lerner
Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy. ~ Gerda Lerner
The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained. ~ Gerda Lerner
Long-term commitment to an intimate relationship with one person of whatever sex is an essential need that people have in order to breed the qualities out of which nurturant thought can rise. ~ Gerda Lerner
Know the ship you sail on. Know its timbers. Deep the fjord waters where you sail, steep the cliffs, deep into the unknown coast goes the winding fjord. ~ Denise Levertov
The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has kinetic force, it sets in motion . . . elements in the reader that would otherwise be stagnant. ~ Denise Levertov
One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language. ~ Denise Levertov
In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms -- so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down. ~ Denise Levertov
But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go. ~ Denise Levertov
You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night. ~ Denise Levertov
Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it. ~ Denise Levertov
Every day, every day I hear ~ Denise Levertov
Political subject matter is looked upon either as an intruder into the realm of poetry, or as a matter that requires special discussion every time it occurs, and can't just be taken for granted like any other subject. ~ Denise Levertov
A poetry articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record. ~ Denise Levertov
Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen. ~ Denise Levertov
Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus. ~ Denise Levertov
I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals. ~ Denise Levertov
Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes." They will say, "Women don't have what it takes. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Thoughts have no sex. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
If God had wanted us to think with our wombs, why did he give us a brain? ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
No good deed goes unpunished. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown helpless about them. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Love is a verb. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
In the final analysis there is no other solution to man's progress but the day's honest work, the day's honest decision, the day's generous influences, and the day's good deed. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
All autobiographies are alibi-ographies. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress, you know that the filibuster was invented by men. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
A man's home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside, it is more often his nursery. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
A woman's best production is a little money of her own. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals with no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Nature abhors a virgin -- a frozen asset. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
I'm in my anecdotage. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
I don't have a warm personal enemy left. They've all died off. I miss them terribly because they helped define me. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
They are vulgar and dirty-minded and alien to grace, and I would not, if I could, which I hasten to say I cannot, cross their obscenities with a wit which is foreign to them and gild their futilities with the glamour which by birth and breeding and performance they do not possess. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
I am rich and famous. I have a talented and gorgeous husband and two beautiful children. I could go on. ~ Madonna
To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return. To just give. That takes courage; because we don't want to fall on our faces or leave ourselves open to hurt. ~ Madonna
Never forget to dream. ~ Madonna
A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don't get what they want. ~ Madonna
I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay. ~ Madonna
Sometimes you have to be a bitch to get things done. ~ Madonna
I became an overachiever to get approval from the world. ~ Madonna
I always thought I should be treated like a star. ~ Madonna
I have the same goal I've had ever since I was a girl. I want to rule the world. ~ Madonna
I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this. ~ Madonna
To me, the whole process of being a brush stroke in someone else's painting is a little difficult. ~ Madonna
Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another. ~ Madonna
Unlike the others, I'd do anything / I'm not the same; I have no shame (from a song on her first album) ~ Madonna
I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams. ~ Madonna
When I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm thirsty, I drink. When I feel like saying something, I say it. ~ Madonna
That we are responsible for our own fate, we reap what we sow, we get what we give, we pull in what we put out. I know these things for sure. ~ Madonna
I'd like to think I am taking people on a journey; I am not just entertaining people, but giving them something to think about when they leave. ~ Madonna
I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art. ~ Madonna
I try to have thick skin, but every once in a while I read something that someone says about me, and it's so slanderous and moralistic and it has nothing to do with my music. ~ Madonna
I want to be like Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and John Lennon... but I want to stay alive. ~ Madonna
I'd love to be a memorable figure in the history of entertainment in some sexual, comic, tragic way. I'd like to leave the impression that Marilyn Monroe did, to be able to arouse so many different feelings in people. ~ Madonna
I think the ultimate challenge is to have some kind of style and grace, even though you haven't got money, or standing in society, or formal education. I had a very middle, lower-middle class sort of upbringing, but I identify with people who've had, at some point in their lives to struggle to survive. It adds another color to your character. ~ Madonna
I want to be remembered as the person who helped us restore faith in ourselves. ~ Wilma Mankiller
We are a people with many, many social indicators of decline and an awful lot of problems, so in the fifties they decided to mainstream us, to try to take us away from the tribal landbase and the tribal culture, get us into the cities. It was supposed to be a better life. ~ Wilma Mankiller
Most people like to deal with us as though we were in a museum or a history book. ~ Wilma Mankiller
There were a significant number of people in this country that were still questioning whether Indians were human. ~ Wilma Mankiller
We've had daunting problems in many critical areas, but I believe in the old Cherokee injunction to 'be of a good mind.' Today it's called positive thinking. ~ Wilma Mankiller
Individually and collectively, Cherokee people possess an extraordinary ability to face down adversity and continue moving forward. ~ Wilma Mankiller
I came to the position with absolute faith and confidence in our own people and our own ability to solve our own problems. ~ Wilma Mankiller
The secret of our success is that we never, never give up. ~ Wilma Mankiller
We must trust our own thinking. Trust where we're going. And get the job done. ~ Wilma Mankiller
There are the extremes on both sides. There are those who have turned their backs on being Cherokee. Then we have a few who refuse to speak much English and think children should only play stickball, not baseball or football. They are suspicious of the non-Indian world, thinking too much assimilation will cause one to stop thinking Cherokee. ~ Wilma Mankiller
There are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history. ~ Wilma Mankiller
In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people. ~ Wilma Mankiller
I don't think anybody anywhere can talk about the future of their people or of an organization without talking about education. Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future. ~ Wilma Mankiller
Growth is a painful process. ~ Wilma Mankiller
Everybody is sitting around saying, 'Well, jeez, we need somebody to solve this problem of bias.' That somebody is us. We all have to try to figure out a better way to get along. ~ Wilma Mankiller
Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief. ~ Wilma Mankiller
I've run into more discrimination as a woman than as an Indian. ~ Wilma Mankiller
It was on Alcatraz...where at long last some Native Americans, including me, truly began to regain our balance. ~ Wilma Mankiller
One of the things my parents taught me, and I'll always be grateful for the gift, is to not ever let anybody else define me. ~ Wilma Mankiller
For a long time I have considered even the craziest ideas about atom nucleus... and suddenly I discovered the truth. ~ Maria Goeppert Mayer
Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man. ~ Maria Goeppert Mayer
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. [ ~ Margaret Mead
I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings. ~ Margaret Mead
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world. ~ Margaret Mead
If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter. ~ Margaret Mead
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good. ~ Margaret Mead
Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time. ~ Margaret Mead
What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things. ~ Margaret Mead
Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on. ~ Margaret Mead
I learned the value of hard work by working hard. ~ Margaret Mead
Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire. ~ Margaret Mead
The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over. ~ Margaret Mead
The ability to learn is older -- as it is also more widespread -- than is the ability to teach. ~ Margaret Mead
We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet. ~ Margaret Mead
I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples -- faraway peoples -- so that Americans might better understand themselves. ~ Margaret Mead
A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know. ~ Margaret Mead
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited. ~ Margaret Mead
Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him. ~ Margaret Mead
The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer. ~ Margaret Mead
I wanted to be treated as a human being who had earned a few rights since her orphanage days. ~ Marilyn Monroe
It's nice to be included in people's fantasies but you also like to be accepted for your own sake. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I'm very definitely a woman and I enjoy it. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it. ~ Marilyn Monroe
People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I've been on a calendar, but never on time. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I am invariably late for appointments ... sometimes, as much as two hours. I've tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong, and too pleasing. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I restore myself when I'm alone. ~ Marilyn Monroe
People respect you because they feel you've survived hard times and endured, and although you've become famous, you haven't become phony. ~ Marilyn Monroe
Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I'm for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them the individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It's really tragic. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I learned also that the best way to keep out of trouble was by never complaining or asking for anything. ~ Marilyn Monroe
At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen.  My body was developed and shapely. But no one knew this but me. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I watched the faces of the listeners when the minister would cry out how much God loved them and how much they needed to set themselves right with God. They were faces without any argument in them, just tired faces that were glad to hear Somebody loved them. ~ Marilyn Monroe
I am an artist and a political being as well.  My aim has been to forge these two concerns into an integrity which affirms language, art, craft, form, beauty, tragedy, and audacity with the needs and vision of women, as part of an emerging new culture which could enrich us all. ~ Robin Morgan
If I had to characterize one quality as the genius of feminist thought, culture, and action, it would be the connectivity. ~ Robin Morgan
Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible. ~ Robin Morgan
Don't accept rides from strange men -- and remember that all men are strange as hell. ~ Robin Morgan
Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We're not inherently anything but human. ~ Robin Morgan
I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body. ~ Robin Morgan
It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you (a) become really committed to winning, and (b) become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom. ~ Robin Morgan
There's something contagious about demanding freedom ~ Robin Morgan
Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility. ~ Robin Morgan
We are the women men warned us about. ~ Robin Morgan
And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism -- the lie that there can be such a thing as "men's liberation groups." Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a "threatening" characteristic shared by the latter group -- skin color or sex or age, etc. ~ Robin Morgan
In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men -- but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. ~ Robin Morgan
[A] legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women --- with men relating to that the best they can. ~ Robin Morgan
Sexism is NOT the fault of women -- kill your fathers, not your mothers. ~ Robin Morgan
We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage. ~ Robin Morgan
I feel that "man-hating" is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them. ~ Robin Morgan
Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. ~ Toni Morrison
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. ~ Toni Morrison
I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. ~ Toni Morrison
When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me. ~ Toni Morrison
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same. ~ Toni Morrison
If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~ Toni Morrison
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?       (from ~ Toni Morrison
I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.     (from Newsweek interview, 1981) ~ Toni Morrison
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression. ~ Toni Morrison
There is really nothing more to say -- except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. (from ~ Toni Morrison
Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf. ~ Toni Morrison
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me. ~ Toni Morrison
I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races. ~ Toni Morrison
In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended. ~ Toni Morrison
If our principles are right, why should we be cowards? ~ Lucretia Mott
The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source. ~ Lucretia Mott
I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity. ~ Lucretia Mott
Let her [woman] receive encouragement for the proper cultivation of all her powers, so that she may enter profitably into the active business of life. ~ Lucretia Mott
Liberty is not less a blessing, because oppression has so long darkened the mind that it can not appreciate it. ~ Lucretia Mott
I grew up so thoroughly imbued with women's rights that it was the most important question of my life from a very early day. ~ Lucretia Mott
My conviction led me to adhere to the sufficiency of the light within us, resting on truth for authority, not on authority for truth. ~ Lucretia Mott
We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth. ~ Lucretia Mott
It is time that Christians were judged more by their likeness to Christ than their notions of Christ. Were this sentiment generally admitted we should not see such tenacious adherence to what men deem the opinions and doctrines of Christ while at the same time in every day practise is exhibited anything but a likeness to Christ. ~ Lucretia Mott
It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her. ~ Lucretia Mott
The cause of Peace has had my share of efforts, taking the ultra non-resistance ground -- that a Christian cannot consistently uphold, and actively support, a government based on the sword, or whose ultimate resort is to the destroying weapons. ~ Lucretia Mott
I think the key is for women not to set any limits. ~ Martina Navratilova
Just go out there and do what you have to do. ~ Martina Navratilova
It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn't. ~ Martina Navratilova
I hope, when I stop, people will think that somehow I mattered. ~ Martina Navratilova
If I feel strongly, I say it. I know I can do more good by being vocal than by staying quiet. I'd have a whole lot more money if I lied, but I wouldn't enjoy spending it. ~ Martina Navratilova
The mark of great sportsmen is not how good they are at their best, but how good they are their worst. ~ Martina Navratilova
The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else. ~ Martina Navratilova
Tennis has given me soul. ~ Martina Navratilova
I just try to concentrate on concentrating. ~ Martina Navratilova
I've been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career. ~ Martina Navratilova
You can't live in the past, there's nothing you can do about it. ~ Martina Navratilova
I shouldn't say I'm looking forward to leading a normal life, because I don't know what normal is. ~ Martina Navratilova
Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people. ~ Martina Navratilova
Disability is a matter of perception. If you can do just one thing well, you're needed by someone. ~ Martina Navratilova
Just by being out you're doing your part. It's like recycling. You're doing your part for the environment if you recycle; you're doing your part for the gay movement if you're out. ~ Martina Navratilova
This is not about special rights, it's about equality. If I marry a woman, how does that affect anyone else? ~ Martina Navratilova
The more people come out, the less it will be an issue. ~ Martina Navratilova
People in the States used to think that if girls were good at sports their sexuality would be affected. Being feminine meant being a cheerleader, not being an athlete. The image of women is changing now. You don't have to be pretty for people to come and see you play. At the same time, if you're a good athlete, it doesn't mean you're not a woman. ~ Martina Navratilova
[when asked whether she was still a lesbian] Are you still the alternative? ~ Martina Navratilova
I came to live in a country I love; some people label me a defector. I have loved men and women in my life; I've been labeled "the bisexual defector" in print. Want to know another secret? I'm even ambidextrous. I don't like labels. Just call me Martina. ~ Martina Navratilova
Women never have a half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have 'no time in the day to themselves.' [1852] ~ Florence Nightingale
And so is the world put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts (which were meant, not for selfish gratification, but for the improvement of that world) to conventionality. [1852] ~ Florence Nightingale
It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. [1859] ~ Florence Nightingale
I can stand out the war with any man. ~ Florence Nightingale
I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause. [1856] ~ Florence Nightingale
Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last. [1857] ~ Florence Nightingale
No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this -- 'devoted and obedient.' This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman. [1859] ~ Florence Nightingale
You ask me why I do not write something.... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results. ~ Florence Nightingale
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~ Anais Nin
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. ~ Anais Nin
Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage. ~ Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. ~ Anais Nin
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. ~ Anais Nin
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. ~ Anais Nin
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. ~ Anais Nin
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. ~ Anais Nin
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. ~ Anais Nin
I write emotional algebra. ~ Anais Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. ~ Anais Nin
To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground. ~ Anais Nin
I am in a beautiful prison from which I can only escape by writing. ~ Anais Nin
My diary is a mirror telling the story of a dreamer who, a long long time ago went through life the way one reads a book. ~ Anais Nin
The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive. ~ Anais Nin
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned. ~ Anais Nin
I have the right to love many people at once and to change my prince often. ~ Anais Nin
What I cannot love, I overlook. ~ Anais Nin
Dreams are necessary to life. ~ Anais Nin
Dreams have helped me to live. ~ Anais Nin
Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensible as poetry. ~ Anais Nin
We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds. ~ Anais Nin
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy. ~ Anais Nin
Jazz is the music of the body. ~ Anais Nin
Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky. ~ Anais Nin
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. ~ Anais Nin
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by loving. ~ Anais Nin
The true face of the unions is not now a man in a hard hat as much as it is a woman in a classroom or in cleaning smocks. ~ Karen Nussbaum
If we continue the way we are going, market forces will not solve the pay gap until 2050. That means my youngest daughter's youngest daughter can expect equal pay. ~ Karen Nussbaum
Every individual is capable of extraordinary things, but no one can accomplish anything by themselves. Working women should count, but the only way we'll make that true is if we work together. ~ Karen Nussbaum
There are questions of real power and then there are questions of phony authority. You have to break through the phony authority to begin to fight the real questions of power. ~ Karen Nussbaum
It is women who primarily provide health care for their families, women who end up taking their kids to the doctor and caring for the other dependents in the family. I think that it's a day-to-day family management crisis for women in a bigger sense than it might be for men. ~ Karen Nussbaum
If you can't afford child care, then you work a different schedule than your husband. ~ Karen Nussbaum
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Our house is made of glass . . . and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it's gone -- its value is incontestable. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
In love there are two things -- bodies and words. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food? ~ Joyce Carol Oates
When poets write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
It is our duty to make this world a better place for women. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
What we suffragettes aspire to be when we are enfranchised is ambassadors of freedom to women in other parts of the world, who are not so free as we are. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
Ability is sexless. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
The inferiority of women is a hideous lie which has been enforced by law and woven into the British constitution. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
We are here to claim our rights as women, not only to be free, but to fight for freedom. It is our privilege, as well as our pride and our joy, to take some part in this militant movement, which, as we believe, means the regeneration of all humanity. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
Where peaceful means had failed, one act of militancy succeeded and never again was the cause ignored by that or any other newspaper. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
We are not ashamed of what we have done, because, when you have a great cause to fight for, the moment of greatest humiliation is the moment when the spirit is proudest. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
Never lose your temper with the Press or the public is a major rule of political life. ~ Christabel Pankhurst
Let us sink such differences as nationality, religion, politics, and set our eyes eternally and forever toward the rising star of the industrial republic of labor. ~ Lucy Parsons
The involuntary aspiration born in man to make the most of one's self, to be loved and appreciated by one's fellow-beings, to "make the world better for having lived in it," will urge him on the nobler deeds than ever the sordid and selfish incentive of material gain has done. ~ Lucy Parsons
There is an innate spring of healthy action in every human being who has not been crushed and pinched by poverty and drudgery from before his birth, that impels him onward and upward. ~ Lucy Parsons
We are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. ~ Lucy Parsons
Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, "Freedom." Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully. ~ Lucy Parsons
Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals. ~ Lucy Parsons
Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth. ~ Lucy Parsons
Strike not for a few cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less. ~ Lucy Parsons
Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then. ~ Lucy Parsons
Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife on the steps of the palace of the rich and stab or shoot their owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity ~ Lucy Parsons
You are not absolutely defenseless. For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known with impunity, cannot be wrested from you. ~ Lucy Parsons
Oh, Misery, I have drunk thy cup of sorrow to its dregs, but I am still a rebel. ~ Lucy Parsons
When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row. ~ Alice Paul
I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality. ~ Alice Paul
It is better, as far as getting the vote is concerned I believe, to have a small, united group than an immense debating society. ~ Alice Paul
I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end. ~ Alice Paul
We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote. ~ Alice Paul
The Woman's Party is made up of women of all races, creeds and nationalities who are united on the one program of working to raise the status of women. ~ Alice Paul
There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it. ~ Alice Paul
It's important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It's the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It's the way we talk about and treat one another. It's who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes the dinner. It's a state of mind. It's the way we live now. ~ Anna Quindlen
Just as we fooled ourselves that the end of discriminatory laws would soon lead to racial harmony, so we thought that increased access to education, advancement and male-only arenas would erase the attitudes that have led some men to treat women like children, fools and punching bags. ~ Anna Quindlen
I think women are superior to men. ~ Anna Quindlen
Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together. ~ Anna Quindlen
But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on. ~ Anna Quindlen
I came to the realization that there were certain public issues that were most usefully dealt with within some sort of framework of at least my private beliefs, if not my private life. ~ Anna Quindlen
These trees don't make a forest. ~ Anna Quindlen
The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you. ~ Anna Quindlen
I think of a column as having a conversation with a person that it just so happens I can't see. ~ Anna Quindlen
My only real political identification has been with women's rights. ~ Anna Quindlen
I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat. ~ Anna Quindlen
Only the deepest sense that they are not like us, that they do not love or live or hurt like us, makes it possible to decree, as [Newt] Gingrich has, that one way to reform the welfare system is to deny aid to the children of mothers under 21 and build orphanages if they are rendered destitute. ~ Anna Quindlen
New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage. ~ Anna Quindlen
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~ Anna Quindlen
For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings. ~ Anna Quindlen
I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society. ~ Anna Quindlen
We want things to be easy for our children, and we know from sad experience that the world can be unkind to girls who do not please, who speak out, who go their own way. But we know from experience, too, that the role of the good girl can be a hollow one, with nothing at the center except other people's expectations where your character might have been. ~ Anna Quindlen
My kids keep trying to convince me that there are two separate parts of their stomachs, one dedicated to dinner and the other to dessert. ~ Anna Quindlen
Life on the planet is born of woman. ~ Adrienne Rich
Women have been the truly active people in all cultures, without whom human society would long ago have perished, though our activity has most often been on the behalf of men and children. ~ Adrienne Rich
I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included. ~ Adrienne Rich
The most notable fact our culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits.  The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities. ~ Adrienne Rich
But to be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination. ~ Adrienne Rich
Lying is done with words and also with silence. ~ Adrienne Rich
False history gets made all day, any day, ~ Adrienne Rich
If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up. ~ Adrienne Rich
The woman I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born. ~ Adrienne Rich
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown. ~ Adrienne Rich
Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism -- the longing to remain the mother's son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him. ~ Adrienne Rich
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons. ~ Adrienne Rich
It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful. ~ Adrienne Rich
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language -- this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. ~ Adrienne Rich
There are days when housework seems the only outlet. ~ Adrienne Rich
Sleeping, turning in turn like planets ~ Adrienne Rich
The moment of change is the only poem. ~ Adrienne Rich
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
The word ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
What is to give light must endure the burning. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
For it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future of the world, the fact remains that people fight these wars. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
It was a wife's duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books, or a particular dish for dinner. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit.  We are all the same in this notion. The potential for greatness lives within each of us. ~ Wilma Rudolph
My doctors told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother. ~ Wilma Rudolph
The triumph can't be had without the struggle. And I know what struggle is. I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women have a chance to reach their dreams. ~ Wilma Rudolph
I don't consciously try to be a role model, so I don't know if I am or not. That's for other people to decide. ~ Wilma Rudolph
I tell them that the most important aspect is to be yourself and have confidence in yourself. I remind them the triumph can't be had without the struggle. ~ Wilma Rudolph
No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helps you. ~ Wilma Rudolph
I thought I'd never get to see that. Florence Griffith Joyner -- every time she ran, I ran. ~ Wilma Rudolph
I walked with braces until I was at least nine years old. My life wasn't like the average person who grew up and decided to enter the world of sports. ~ Wilma Rudolph
My mother taught me very early to believe I could achieve any accomplishment I wanted to.  The first was to walk without braces. ~ Wilma Rudolph
I ran and ran and ran every day, and I acquired this sense of determination, this sense of spirit that I would never, never give up, no matter what else happened. ~ Wilma Rudolph
By the time I was 12 I was challenging every boy in our neighborhood at running, jumping, everything. ~ Wilma Rudolph
The feeling of accomplishment welled up inside of me, three Olympic gold medals. I knew that was something nobody could ever take away from me, ever. ~ Wilma Rudolph
When I was going through my transition of being famous, I tried to ask God why was I here? what was my purpose? Surely, it wasn't just to win three gold medals.  There has to be more to this life than that. ~ Wilma Rudolph
What do you do after you are world famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world. ~ Wilma Rudolph
When the sun is shining I can do anything; no mountain is too high, no trouble too difficult. ~ Wilma Rudolph
I believe in me more than anything in this world. ~ Wilma Rudolph
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. ~ Margaret Sanger
Greater understanding and practice of planned parenthood, through the use of contraceptive measures prescribed by doctors and clinics, will mean that there will be more strong and healthy children and fewer defective and handicapped babies unable to find a useful or happy place in life. ~ Margaret Sanger
It is our experience, as it was our aim, that as a result of child-spacing, and adequate care of mothers, death rates would be reduced. It is now a fact that as a result of birth control, the survival rate among mothers and children is higher. There is less suffering for all groups. ~ Margaret Sanger
Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression. ~ Margaret Sanger
When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race. ~ Margaret Sanger
The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses. ~ Margaret Sanger
Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises. ~ Margaret Sanger
War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted. ~ Margaret Sanger
No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources. ~ Margaret Sanger
Now one of two things is true: Either a republic is a desirable form of government, or else it is not. If it is, then we should have it, if it is not, then we ought not to pretend that we have it. ~ Anna Howard Shaw
Cogito ergo boom. ~ Susan Sontag
Sanity is a cozy lie. ~ Susan Sontag
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. ~ Susan Sontag
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. ~ Susan Sontag
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. ~ Susan Sontag
It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making. ~ Susan Sontag
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. ~ Susan Sontag
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them. ~ Susan Sontag
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. ~ Susan Sontag
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. ~ Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. ~ Susan Sontag
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. ~ Susan Sontag
"Camp" is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated. ~ Susan Sontag
War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically;" that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent - war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. ~ Susan Sontag
Contemporary art, no matter how much it has defined itself by a taste for negation, can still be analyzed as a set of assertions of a formal kind. ~ Susan Sontag
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it. ~ Susan Sontag
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood. ~ Susan Sontag
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. ~ Susan Sontag
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. ~ Susan Sontag
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up. ~ Susan Sontag
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. ~ Susan Sontag
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe -- though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived. ~ Susan Sontag
Every serious dancer is driven by notions of perfection -- perfect expressiveness, perfect technique. ~ Susan Sontag
Taste has no system and no proofs. ~ Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge ~ Susan Sontag
Every serious dancer is driven by notions of perfection -- perfect expressiveness, perfect technique. of the intellectual upon art. ~ Susan Sontag
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. ~ Susan Sontag
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. (from " ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. (from " ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Woman will always be dependent until she holds a purse of her own. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A mind always in contact with children and servants, whose aspirations and ambitions rise no higher than the roof that shelters it, is necessarily dwarfed in its proportions. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Men say we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record and henceforth stand by womanhood. If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
It would be ridiculous to talk of male and female atmospheres, male and female springs or rains, male and female sunshine . . . . how much more ridiculous is it in relation to mind, to soul, to thought, where there is as undeniably no such thing as sex, to talk of male and female education and of male and female schools. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the woman's sex are both ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. ~ Gloria Steinem
We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters. ~ Gloria Steinem
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs. ~ Gloria Steinem
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age. ~ Gloria Steinem
But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, "How can I combine career and family?" ~ Gloria Steinem
A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after. ~ Gloria Steinem
Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage. ~ Gloria Steinem
We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs. ~ Gloria Steinem
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry. ~ Gloria Steinem
Most women are one man away from welfare. ~ Gloria Steinem
If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? ~ Gloria Steinem
Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it. ~ Gloria Steinem
Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers. ~ Gloria Steinem
I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words. ~ Gloria Steinem
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot? ~ Gloria Steinem
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. ~ Gloria Steinem
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself. ~ Gloria Steinem
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space. ~ Gloria Steinem
The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Women are the real architects of society. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women? ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Friendships are discovered rather than made. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Human nature is above all things -- lazy. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred--that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. . . . If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
In all ranks of life the human heart yearns for the beautiful; and the beautiful things that God makes are his gift to all alike. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
I cannot help wondering sometimes what I might have become and might have done if I had lived in a country which had not circumscribed and handicapped me on account of my race, that had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain. ~ Mary Church Terrell
Please stop using the word "Negro." .... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us. ~ Mary Church Terrell
It is impossible for any white person in the United States, no matter how sympathetic and broad, to realize what life would mean to him if his incentive to effort were suddenly snatched away. To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of score of colored youth. ~ Mary Church Terrell
Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear. ~ Mary Church Terrell
As a colored woman I may enter more than one white church in Washington without receiving that welcome which as a human being I have the right to expect in the sanctuary of God. ~ Mary Church Terrell
When Ernestine Rose, Lucretia Mott, ~ Mary Church Terrell
We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state. ~ Margaret Thatcher
Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul. ~ Margaret Thatcher
In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman. ~ Margaret Thatcher
Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country. ~ Margaret Thatcher
I've got a woman's ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it. ~ Margaret Thatcher
It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs. ~ Margaret Thatcher
The woman's mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities. ~ Margaret Thatcher
I owe nothing to Women's Lib. ~ Margaret Thatcher
The battle for women's rights has been largely won. ~ Margaret Thatcher
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. ~ Margaret Thatcher
The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians. ~ Margaret Thatcher
There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. ~ Margaret Thatcher
If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing. ~ Margaret Thatcher
I love argument, I love debate. I don't expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that's not their job. ~ Margaret Thatcher
I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left. ~ Margaret Thatcher
If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn't swim. ~ Margaret Thatcher
I'm extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end. ~ Margaret Thatcher
To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best. ~ Margaret Thatcher
Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides. ~ Margaret Thatcher
To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects. ~ Margaret Thatcher
U-turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning. ~ Margaret Thatcher
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. ~ Margaret Thatcher
What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose. ~ Margaret Thatcher
Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. it's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do and you've done it. ~ Margaret Thatcher
I think I'll work all my life. When you're having fun, why stop having fun? ~ Helen Thomas
There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred -- by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans. ~ Helen Thomas
I'm a liberal, I was born a liberal, and I will be a liberal till the day I die. ~ Helen Thomas
We won`t really know what will happen until it happens. ~ Helen Thomas
Printer's ink was in my veins, I decided, and I became dedicated to the proposition that this was the life for me ~ Helen Thomas
I was so lucky to pick a profession where it's a joy to go to work every day. ~ Helen Thomas
We in the press have a special role since there is no other institution in our society that can hold the President accountable. I do believe that our democracy can endure and prevail only if the American people are informed. ~ Helen Thomas
I don't think a tough question is disrespectful. ~ Helen Thomas
People will never know how hard it is to get information, especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp TOP SECRET on the color of the walls. ~ Helen Thomas
When you're in the news business, you always expect the unexpected. ~ Helen Thomas
I suppose that's democracy really. But everybody with a laptop thinks they're a journalist these days. That's a problem. ~ Helen Thomas
Reporters see so much more than anyone else, really, if they open their eyes. It's their job to take a very human approach. I don't see how you can see what's all around you and not be liberal. You see the poor. You see the hungry. You see the suffering. ~ Helen Thomas
We were raised not only to do something with our lives but be somebody, even us girls, uncommon as that thinking was in those days. ~ Helen Thomas
We got the vote, which we should've been born with, in 1920. Everything we've had to struggle for -- it's ridiculous. ~ Helen Thomas
[Reporters] are not there to curry presidential favor, nor can we respond to efforts at presidential intimidation. Our priority is the peoples' right to know -- without fear or favor. We are the peoples' servants. ~ Helen Thomas
When it comes to the Presidential news conference, I have never lost my sense of awe that I am able to quiz a President of the United States -- politely I hope, but if necessary to hold his feet to the fire. ~ Helen Thomas
Thank you Mister President.  [ ~ Helen Thomas
All presidents rail against the press. It goes with the turf. ~ Helen Thomas
Every President hates the Press. ~ Helen Thomas
Every president thinks that all information that comes to the White House is their private preserve after they all promise an open administration on the campaign trail, but some are more secretive than others. Some want to lock down everything. ~ Helen Thomas
I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate. ~ Helen Thomas
There was no way he could save himself. It was like a Greek tragedy. ~ Helen Thomas
All of us who covered the Reagans agreed that President Reagan was personable and charming. But I'm not so certain he was nice. ~ Helen Thomas
This is the worst President ever. He [George W. Bush] is the worst President in all of American history. ~ Helen Thomas
The day Dick Cheney is going to run for president, I'll kill myself. All we need is another liar... I think he'd like to run, but it would be a sad day for the country if he does. ~ Helen Thomas
It should be mandatory that every president would read the Constitution. Too many swear to uphold the Constitution and then make end runs around it. ~ Helen Thomas
This administration in particular has chipped away at the Bill of Rights while the people were numbed by the trauma of 9/11, and we let them get away with it. Not only the people at large but the Congress has been willing to abridge our rights through the PATRIOT Act, a terrific infringement of our privacy. ~ Helen Thomas
But when will our leaders learn - war is not the answer. ~ Helen Thomas
If we care about the children, the grandchildren, the future generations, we need to make sure that they do not become the cannon fodder of the future. ~ Helen Thomas
I told the young leaders that the 21st Century is theirs and they should not blow it. Try to reject war and give peace a chance. Question the powers that be and find out why they make the dubious decisions they do that send young people to war. ~ Helen Thomas
It's time for women to make their voices heard. Their silence on the subject of war and peace is deafening. ~ Helen Thomas
You don't spread democracy through the barrel of a gun. ~ Helen Thomas
To start a new century with a war, what can young people think? ~ Helen Thomas
Who ever plans on falling in love? I certainly didn't have a two-track mind back then when I first started covering the White House. I didn't think it was possible to do the kind of work I loved to do and still be a wife.... How wrong -- and how lucky -- I was. ~ Helen Thomas
I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody. ~ Lily Tomlin
Success is a ladder that cannot be climbed with your hands in your pocket. ~ Lily Tomlin
Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them. ~ Lily Tomlin
Exercise is for people who can't handle drugs or alcohol. ~ Lily Tomlin
Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers. ~ Lily Tomlin
I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves; I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness. ~ Lily Tomlin
I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe. ~ Lily Tomlin
The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral. ~ Lily Tomlin
There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic. ~ Lily Tomlin
All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific. ~ Lily Tomlin
Remember we're all in this alone. ~ Lily Tomlin
If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question? ~ Lily Tomlin
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up. ~ Lily Tomlin
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. ~ Lily Tomlin
It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. ~ Lily Tomlin
What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch. ~ Lily Tomlin
For fast acting relief, try slowing down. ~ Lily Tomlin
If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than 'survival of the fittest.' I think a better idea would be 'survival of the wittiest.' At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing. ~ Lily Tomlin
Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs. ~ Lily Tomlin
The best mind-altering drug is the truth. ~ Lily Tomlin
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library? ~ Lily Tomlin
Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination. ~ Lily Tomlin
Why is it when we talk to God, we're said to be praying - but when God talks to us, we're schizophrenic? ~ Lily Tomlin
If I had known what it would be like to have it all, I might have been willing to settle for less. ~ Lily Tomlin
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world. ~ Lily Tomlin
Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. ~ Lily Tomlin
Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed. ~ Lily Tomlin
If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared? ~ Lily Tomlin
I grew up like a neglected weed -- ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. ~ Harriet Tubman
I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a ~ Harriet Tubman
I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. ~ Harriet Tubman
Quakers almost as good as colored.... They call themselves friends and you can trust them every time. ~ Harriet Tubman
I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger. ~ Harriet Tubman
We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped. ~ Harriet Tubman
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. ~ Irina Dunn
Any woman whose I.Q. hovers above her body temperature must be a feminist. ~ Rita Mae Brown
If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle. ~ Rita Mae Brown
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you. ~ Rita Mae Brown
As a woman, I find it very embarrassing to be in a meeting and realize I'm the only one in the room with balls. ~ Rita Mae Brown
I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it. ~ Rita Mae Brown
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. ~ Rita Mae Brown
I believe in a lively disrespect for most forms of authority. ~ Rita Mae Brown
The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself. ~ Rita Mae Brown
A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment. ~ Rita Mae Brown
I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Morals are private. Decency is public. ~ Rita Mae Brown
To love without role, without power plays, is revolution. ~ Rita Mae Brown
This is a celebration of individual freedom, not of homosexuality. No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Women who love women are Lesbians. Men, because they can only think of women in sexual terms, define Lesbian as sex between women. ~ Rita Mae Brown
I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television. ~ Rita Mae Brown
I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. ~ Rita Mae Brown
A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Language is a road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Writers will happen in the best of families. ~ Rita Mae Brown
The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being. ~ Emma Goldman
The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul. ~ Emma Goldman
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. ~ Emma Goldman
The most vital right is the right to love and be loved. ~ Emma Goldman
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open. ~ Emma Goldman
To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock. ~ Emma Goldman
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal. ~ Emma Goldman
All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them. ~ Emma Goldman
From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it. ~ Grace Hopper
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission. ~ Grace Hopper
It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. ~ Grace Hopper
The most dangerous phrase in the language is, "We've always done it this way." ~ Grace Hopper
Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise. ~ Grace Hopper
A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things. ~ Grace Hopper
You don't manage people, you manage things. You lead people. ~ Grace Hopper
Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down. Respect for one's superiors; care for one's crew. ~ Grace Hopper
One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions. ~ Grace Hopper
Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be an entry which reads, "Information"; for in most cases, the information is more valuable than the hardware which processes it. ~ Grace Hopper
We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question. ~ Grace Hopper
To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge. ~ Grace Hopper
They told me computers could only do arithmetic. ~ Grace Hopper
In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn't budge a log, they didn't try to grow a larger ox. We shouldn't be trying for bigger computers, but for more systems of computers. ~ Grace Hopper
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems. ~ Grace Hopper
We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington. ~ Grace Hopper
At any given moment, there is always a line representing what your boss will believe. If you step over it, you will not get your budget. Go as close to that line as you can. ~ Grace Hopper
Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it. ~ Germaine Greer
The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth. ~ Germaine Greer
The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. ~ Germaine Greer
Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. ~ Germaine Greer
I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover. ~ Germaine Greer
The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee. ~ Germaine Greer
Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin. ~ Germaine Greer
Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run? ~ Germaine Greer
One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night. ~ Germaine Greer
The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not. ~ Germaine Greer
The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement. ~ Germaine Greer
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood. ~ Germaine Greer
Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism. ~ Germaine Greer
All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health. ~ Germaine Greer
Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps and watches the television. ~ Germaine Greer
The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion. ~ Germaine Greer
Women fail to understand how much men hate them. ~ Germaine Greer
All men hate some women some of the time and some men hate all women all of the time. ~ Germaine Greer
The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough. ~ Germaine Greer
For a male child to become a man, he has to reject his mother. It's an essential part of masculinisation. ~ Germaine Greer
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother. ~ Germaine Greer
All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women. ~ Germaine Greer
The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk. ~ Germaine Greer
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing. ~ Germaine Greer
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. ~ Germaine Greer
You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose. ~ Indira Gandhi
My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition. ~ Indira Gandhi
Martyrdom does not end something, it is only a beginning. ~ Indira Gandhi
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist. ~ Indira Gandhi
There are moments in history when brooding tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past. ~ Indira Gandhi
There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.  ~ Indira Gandhi
I would say our greatest achievement is to have survived as a free and democratic nation.
I don't mind if my life goes in the service of the nation. If I die today every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation. (said the night before she was assassinated) ~ Indira Gandhi
To bear many children is considered not only a religious blessing but also an investment. The greater their number, some Indians reason, the more alms they can beg. ~ Indira Gandhi
The greatest danger to our future is apathy. ~ Jane Goodall
Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference. ~ Jane Goodall
If you really want something, and really work hard, and take advantage of opportunities, and never give up, you will find a way. ~ Jane Goodall
Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we help. Only if we help shall they be saved. ~ Jane Goodall
That I did not fail was due in part to patience.... ~ Jane Goodall
The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves. ~ Jane Goodall
I wanted to talk to the animals like Dr. Doolittle. ~ Jane Goodall
Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature. ~ Jane Goodall
The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man -- whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them. ~ Jane Goodall
People say to me so often, "Jane how can you be so peaceful when everywhere around you people want books signed, people are asking these questions and yet you seem peaceful," and I always answer that it is the peace of the forest that I carry inside. ~ Jane Goodall
Especially now when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries. ~ Jane Goodall
Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don't change. ~ Jane Goodall
Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right. ~ Jane Goodall
We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources. ~ Jane Goodall
Anyone who tries to improve the lives of animals invariably comes in for criticism from those who believe such efforts are misplaced in a world of suffering humanity. ~ Jane Goodall
In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes. ~ Jane Goodall
I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.
For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support. ~ Audre Lorde
Without community, there is no liberation. ~ Audre Lorde
When I dare to be powerful -- to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing. ~ Audre Lorde
Who I am is what fulfills me and what fulfills the vision I have of a world. ~ Audre Lorde
Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded. ~ Audre Lorde
Revolution is not a onetime event. ~ Audre Lorde
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now. ~ Audre Lorde
We are powerful because we have survived. ~ Audre Lorde
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. ~ Audre Lorde
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. ~ Audre Lorde
Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away. ~ Audre Lorde
There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. ~ Audre Lorde
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself -- whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. -- because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. ~ Audre Lorde
What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny? ~ Audre Lorde
We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt. ~ Audre Lorde
Our visions begin with our desires. ~ Audre Lorde
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. ~ Audre Lorde
As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas -- the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. ~ Audre Lorde
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. ~ Audre Lorde
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. ~ Audre Lorde
Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul. ~ Audre Lorde
Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me -- so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. ~ Audre Lorde
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. ~ Audre Lorde
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction. ~ Audre Lorde
To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. ~ Audre Lorde
You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other. Not cover that sense of worthlessness with "I don't want you" or "it doesn't matter" or "white folks feel, Black folks do." ~ Audre Lorde
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. ~ Audre Lorde
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. ~ Audre Lorde
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't. ~ Audre Lorde
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak. ~ Audre Lorde
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. ~ Audre Lorde
But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it. ~ Audre Lorde
Never doubt that you can change history. You already have. ~ Marge Piercy
Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen. ~ Marge Piercy
In an elitist world, it's always "women and children last." ~ Marge Piercy
A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done. ~ Marge Piercy
All women hustle. Women watch faces, voices, gestures, moods. The person who has to survive through cunning. ~ Marge Piercy
All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations. ~ Marge Piercy
Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. ~ Marge Piercy
We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways. ~ Marge Piercy
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. ~ Marge Piercy
The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel. ~ Marge Piercy
The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real. ~ Marge Piercy
Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. ~ Marge Piercy
What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof. ~ Marge Piercy
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war. ~ Marge Piercy
Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't. ~ Marge Piercy
This life is a war we are not yet winning for our daughters' children. Don't do your enemies' work for them. Finish your own. ~ Marge Piercy
We are trying to live as if we were an experiment conducted by the future. ~ Marge Piercy
Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third. ~ Marge Piercy
My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb. ~ Marge Piercy
It you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening. ~ Marge Piercy
My idea of Hell is to be young again. ~ Marge Piercy
A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over. ~ Marge Piercy
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. ~ Marge Piercy
With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life. ~ Marge Piercy
I mourn in grey, grey as the sleeted wind the bled shades of twilight, gunmetal, battleships, industrial paint. ~ Marge Piercy
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. ~ Marge Piercy
Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats. ~ Marge Piercy
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concreted situation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman? ~ Simone de Beauvoir
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born. ~ Simone de Beauvoir
One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done. ~ Marie Curie
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. ~ Marie Curie
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. ~ Marie Curie
A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales. ~ Marie Curie
I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy. ~ Marie Curie
We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. ~ Marie Curie
I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy. ~ Marie Curie
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained. ~ Marie Curie
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas. ~ Marie Curie
I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries. ~ Marie Curie
There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth. ~ Marie Curie
When one studies strongly radioactive substances special precautions must be taken. Dust, the air of the room, and one's clothes, all become radioactive. ~ Marie Curie
After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it. ~ Marie Curie
I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory. (about a wedding dress)  ~ Marie Curie