Quotes by 20th-century Women

Madonna

Marilyn Monroe

Anne Frank

Elizabeth II

J. K. Rowling

Margaret Thatcher

Audrey Hepburn

It's not the most intellectual job in the world, but I do have to know the letters.

Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.

Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Katherine Porter

I have repeatedly said, when asked, that if the stories about me helped inspired our troops and rally a nation, then perhaps there was some good. However, I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend, when the real heroics — of my fellow soldiers that day — were legendary.

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say.

How wonderful it is that no one has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world!

Lee's great gifts are teaching and inspirational guidance, not administration and management.

Cheryl Crawford

Our religion doesn't give women any human dignity. Women are considered slaves... I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.

The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

In tomorrow's world we must all work together as hard as ever, if we're truly to be United Nations

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I refuel.

I was never happy in Hollywood. There, everything is distorted by the importance people give to money.

No Western nation has to build a wall round itself to keep its people in.

Margaret Thatcher

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

I've made forty-three pictures. Naturally I'm adorable in all of them.

Katharine Hepburn

My desk, most loyal friend
thank you. You've been with me on
every road I've taken.
My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva

For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown.... It is a city that offers me more people — more different kinds of people — than I could otherwise possibly have come to know in a lifetime: the native Washingtonian, the local merchant, the foreign diplomat, the ever-present tourist, the public servant, the journalist, the president, the friend.

Katharine Graham

When I started my public life, twelve years ago, I understood the media might be interested in what I did. I realized then their attention would inevitably focus on both our private and public lives. But I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become. Nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner, that's been hard to bear. At the end of this year, when I've completed my diary of official engagements, I will be reducing the extent of the public life I've lead so far.

Diana, Princess of Wales

Come on girls! Do you believe in love? Cause I got something to say about it.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Annie Leibovitz

The true way and the sure way to friendship is through humility-being open to each other, accepting each other just as we are, knowing each other.