Quotes by 20th-century Women

Madonna

Marilyn Monroe

Anne Frank

Elizabeth II

J. K. Rowling

Margaret Thatcher

Audrey Hepburn

You can't accomplish anything worthwhile if you inhibit yourself

Keeping books on charity is capitalist nonsense! I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it.

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.

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

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

My studies gave me only a very superficial knowledge of philosophy but sharpened my interest in it. I benefited greatly from being a teacher—that is, from being able to spend a great deal of time reading, writing and educating myself.

Simone de Beauvoir

Golf is a spiritual game. It's like Zen. You have to let your mind take over.

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.

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

Margaret Thatcher

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.

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

Katharine Hepburn

Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life.

Charlotte Bunch

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Cheryl Crawford

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

While bringing about reforms and improving institutions, we have to be cautious that while shaking the tree to remove the bad fruit, we do not bring down the tree itself.

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

Become one with eternity.
Become part of your environment.
Take off your clothes.
Forget yourself. Make love.
Self-destruction is the only
way to peace.

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

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.

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