Shirley Chisholm Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.

Shirley Chisholm
Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth.

Shirley Chisholm
Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.

Shirley Chisholm
When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

Shirley Chisholm
The liberals in the House strongly resemble liberals I have known through the last two decades in the civil rights conflict. When it comes time to show on which side they will be counted, they excuse themselves.

Shirley Chisholm
We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state.

Shirley Chisholm
To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.

Shirley Chisholm
Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason.

Shirley Chisholm
Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live. Until a problem reaches their doorsteps, they're not going to understand. They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them.

Shirley Chisholm
The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers — a great pity, on both counts. It is not too late to complete the work they left undone. Today, here, we should start to do so.

Shirley Chisholm
Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. Even when the problems it ignores build up to crises and erupt in strikes, riots, and demonstrations, it has not moved. Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.

Shirley Chisholm
Health is a human right, not a privilege to be purchased.

Shirley Chisholm
Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.

Shirley Chisholm
Some members of Congress are among the best actors in the world.

Shirley Chisholm
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'

Shirley Chisholm
Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.

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
There is a good deal of evidence that the United States is moving to the right, and that the main force behind the movement is a resurgence, in a new form, of racial prejudice.

Shirley Chisholm
Women know, and so do many men, that two or three children who are wanted, prepared for, reared amid love and stability, and educated to the limit of their ability will mean more for the future of the black and brown races from which they come than any number of neglected, hungry, ill-housed and ill-clothed youngsters. Pride in one's race, as will simple humanity, supports
this view.

Shirley Chisholm
I hope if I am remembered it will finally be for what I have done, not for what I happen to be.

Shirley Chisholm
Which is more like genocide, I have asked some of my black brothers - this, the way things are, or the conditions I am fighting for in which the full range of family planning services is available to women of all classes and colors, starting with effective contraception and extending to safe, legal terminations of undesired pregnancies at a price they can afford?

Shirley Chisholm
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.

Shirley Chisholm
Of my two "handicaps," being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black. The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl.

Shirley Chisholm
America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity.

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
That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

Shirley Chisholm
I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate of the people.

Shirley Chisholm
I have met far more discrimination as a woman than being black in the field of politics.

Shirley Chisholm
Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

Shirley Chisholm
I love America not for what she is, but for what she can become.

Shirley Chisholm