Bella Abzug Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

Women have been trained to speak softly and carry lipstick. Those days are over.

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
Both houses are dominated by a male, white, middle-aged, middle- and upper-middle-class power elite that stand with their backs turned to the needs and demands of our people for realistic change.

Bella Abzug
Richard Nixon impeached himself. He gave us Gerald Ford as his revenge.

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
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've got to bring the government up to date. It's insane to try to live under the same governmental structures set up nearly two hundred years ago.

Bella Abzug
The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be in the arrangement of your chromosomes.

Bella Abzug
In Britain the government has to come down in front of Parliament every day to explain its actions, but here the President never answers directly to Congress.

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
We don't so much want to see a female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.

Bella Abzug
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. There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am —and this ought to be made very clear—I am a very serious woman.

Bella Abzug
The establishment is made up of little men, very frightened.

Bella Abzug
There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing.... But whatever I am—and this ought to be made very clear at the outset—I am a very serious woman.

Bella Abzug
When I was a young lawyer, working women wore hats. It was the only way they would take you seriously.

Bella Abzug
Never go back, never apologize, and never forget we're half the human race.

Bella Abzug
This woman's place is in the House — the House of Representatives.

Bella Abzug
We have done almost everything in pairs since Noah, except govern. And the world has suffered for it.

Bella Abzug